The Transformation of the World (163 page)

In comparison with the post-1917 “aristocide,”
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the nineteenth century was rather like a golden October of the European nobility, especially for its upper ranks. The embourgeoisement of the world ground on relentlessly, though at a moderate pace. Precipitate declines occurred elsewhere—for instance, in Mexico during the revolution of 1910–20,
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or in the three main societies of Asia.

India: A Neo-British Landed Aristocracy?

In India, the princes and their feudal retinues were initially stripped of their functions in one region under British rule after another. The British abandoned this policy after the Great Rebellion of 1857/58, however, as the utopia of a
middle-class India, dreamed up by influential English utilitarians in the 1820s and 1830s, lost its attractiveness. Henceforth the main effort went into feudalizing at least the external appearance of British rule. So long as the maharajahs and nizams remained loyal, disarmed, and financially spoon-fed, serving as picturesque disguises for the bureaucratic character of the colonial state, they had nothing to fear.
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A new, specifically Indian nobility was invented, with Queen Victoria as its distant empress from 1876 on. The romantic chivalry of Victorianism, which in the British Isles expressed itself in neo-Gothic architecture and the odd tournament, had a much larger stage in India and was accompanied with much more colorful pomp.

The details of nobility in India are a complicated matter. As in other parts of the world, the British—or anyway the aristocrats who found employment early on in the “bourgeois” East India Company—looked for an Indian counterpart (a “landed nobility”) but had considerable trouble finding one because of the different legal frameworks. Early modern European observers had recognized the problem when they pointed out that private individuals did not really own land in Asia; everything was subject to the monarch's overlordship. In some theories of “Oriental despotism,” Montesquieu's being the most notable, this was blown up into the idea that private property in general (not only landownership) was completely insecure—but the Montesquieu school was not altogether on the wrong track. However much Asian countries differed in their legal relations, the link between a particular piece of land and a noble family was seldom as safe from monarchical infringement as it was in most parts of Europe. In Asia, the status and income of the upper classes often derived less from direct landownership than from a (perhaps fleeting) enfeoffment or from tax-farming privileges assigned by the ruler to individuals or groups. On the eve of the East India Company's power grab, the zamindars of Bengal, for example, were not an entrenched landed nobility in the English sense but a rural elite with rights to a sinecure—though admittedly they kept up a grand lifestyle and held the real power in villages. For the British, they were a quasi-aristocracy that promised to guarantee social stability in the countryside, both then and in the future. For a time every effort was made to transform them into a genuine aristocracy more suited to a “civilized” country, except that they were not left with their old police and judicial powers.
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The promotion of the Bengal zamindars, including their provision with enforceable land deeds, was only a prelude to their fall. Some of them were no match for the market forces that the colonial order now unleashed; others lived to see the British impose crippling financial demands that could and did end in expropriation. Old established families faced ruin, while new ones arose out of the merchant class. The consolidation of the zamindars into a European-style hereditary aristocracy was a failure, and the hope that they would become “improving” landlords able to invest and develop scientific farming methods ended in disappointment. In the early twentieth century, it would not be zamindars but
middle peasants who became the dominant rural stratum in Bengal and many other regions of India, as well as the social base for the independence movement. By 1920, lofty mind-sets and lifestyles were no less marginal in India than in Europe.

Japan: The Self-Transformation of the Samurai

Japan took a sui generis path.
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In no other major country did a privileged status group undergo such a transformation. The Japanese equivalent of the European nobility was the samurai, originally warriors bound to a lord by strong ties of loyalty and mutual advantage. After the pacification of Japan in the decades around 1600, most samurai remained in the service either of the shogun or of the 260 or so feudal princes (
daimyō
) among whom the Japanese archipelago was divided. Integrated into the elaborate hierarchy underpinning the shogunate, they were endowed with a number of symbolic markers that identified them as members of a special warrior aristocracy at the very time when no more wars needed to be fought. Many samurai swapped the sword for the paintbrush and took on bureaucratic tasks, making Japan one of the most densely (though not in every respect most efficiently) administered countries in the world. Yet for many samurai and their families there was literally nothing to do. Some worked as teachers, others as foresters or doormen, while others still were secretly active in the despised world of commerce. All the more stubbornly did they cling to their hereditary privileges: the right to bear a family name, to carry a sword and wear special clothing, to ride on horseback and force others to make way for them in the street. All this meant that they closely resembled the nobles of Europe. But their 5 to 6 percent share of the population in the early nineteenth century was comparable only to that of exceptional European countries (Poland and Spain) and much larger than the European norm of well below one percent.
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The lack of meaningful functions was therefore a major problem, even in quantitative terms, and exacted a high toll from society in general. The main difference with Europe lay in the isolation of the samurai from the countryside: they generally owned no land, let alone any with legally enforceable deeds. Instead, they were paid stipends measured in rice and usually dispensed in kind. The typical samurai, then, did not control any of the three factors of production: land, labor, and least of all capital. He was a particularly vulnerable element of Japanese society.

When the post-1853 confrontation with the West brought Japan's chronic problems to crisis point, it was primarily samurai from princedoms remote from the House of Tokugawa who supplied the initiative for change at national level. This small group, which overthrew the shogunate in 1867–68 and set about building the new Meiji order, recognized that samurai could survive as a distinctive section of society only if they lost their antiquated status. The most important props of their existence were removed with the disempowerment of the princes and the sweeping transformation of the daimyates, and from 1869
on, samurai status was gradually dismantled. The harshest economic blow was the abolition of stipends (cushioned at first by their replacement with government bonds); the worst symbolic humiliation, in 1876, was the revocation of the privilege of the sword. Individual samurai now had to fend for themselves; an important step in 1871 had been the recognition of the freedom to choose an occupation (which the revolution had decreed in France back in 1790). After the final samurai revolts of 1877, there was no longer any resistance to this policy turn.
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It brought great hardship for many samurai and their families, and the social policies of the government offered only partial alleviation.

The samurai lingered on as an ethos and a myth, but in the 1880s they evaporated as a recognizable element of Japanese society. A new upper nobility, created by the Meiji state in imitation of the British peerage, is reminiscent of a Napoleonic artefact; it was embraced by remnants of the
daimyō
families and the old court aristocracy in Kyoto, while the oligarchs—mostly men under forty at the time of the regime change in 1867–68—bestowed it on themselves as a reward. In the new political system, which from 1890 included a second chamber along the lines of the House of Lords, this nobility would play a significant role as a buffer between the revered and remote tennō and the “common people.”

China: Decline and Transformation of the Mandarins

China came closer to European conditions; indeed, it was in many ways ahead in its modernity. It had already had a largely unrestricted market for land in the eighteenth century, and feudal burdens and obligations to private lords had almost disappeared. There was no way of legally enshrining in perpetuity a family's control of a particular piece of land, yet—as in Europe—the acquisition of title deeds made it largely secure from state intervention. But can China's scholar-officials, often called “mandarins” or “literati” by European observers, really be seen as the equivalent of a European nobility? In many respects they certainly can. They had effective control over the bulk of land used for agriculture, and they were the dominant force culturally, far less challenged in this than the European nobility of the early modern period. The most important difference was that, although ownership of land was passed down within the family, status could not be inherited; the two were almost entirely separate from each other. The stratum known in Chinese as
shenshi
and often translated in English as “gentry” represented approximately 1.5 percent of the population—between the percentage share of the nobility in Europe and that in Japan. Entry to it was achieved through state examinations held at regular intervals.
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Only those who scored at the least the lowest of nine passing grades could enjoy the reputation and palpable benefits of a
shenshi
, including such things as tax exemption and immunity from corporal punishment.

A
shenshi
could consider himself and his family to be part of the local upper class, entrusted with a range of leadership tasks. Where clan organizations
existed, he belonged to their inner elite. He shared in the cultural and social world of the Confucian
qunzi
, whose basic normative structure corresponded in many ways to that of the English gentleman. Imperial officials, on the other hand, were appointed only from among those who had achieved the top passing grades, usually in an examination in the capital conducted by the emperor himself. To place one of its sons as a court official or a member of the provincial administration was the highest ambition of a family in the hierarchy-conscious society of Imperial China.

Historians have repeatedly contrasted Japan's success with China's failure: the one converted the shock of being “opened up” into a major program of modernization and nation building, whereas the other misread the signs of the times and missed the opportunity to strengthen itself through renewal. China's immobility had various causes. At least as important as a “culturally” determined lack of interest in the outside world were the lack of a strong monarchy after 1820 and the delicate balance in the state apparatus between Manchu dignitaries and Han Chinese officials; any strong impetus to reform threatened this unstable equilibrium. That is one way of reading Chinese history, but we might also experiment with posing the key question in a different way. Why was it that in Japan a much lesser impulse from abroad—Commodore Perry's theatrical intrusion was by no means comparable to the Opium War of 1839–42—triggered a much sturdier response than in China?

Two answers are possible. The first is that the Chinese official elite, having previously concerned itself with border issues, had infinitely greater experience of dealing with aggressive foreigners of every kind; the Japanese samurai, disoriented by the arrival of red-haired barbarians from across the ocean, had no schemas of conduct to fall back upon and were forced into a radical reorientation. So long as the external threat did not reach China's real power center in Beijing (it came near to that only in 1860, with the plunder and destruction of the Summer Palace), the old methods of keeping foreigners at bay still seemed reasonably effective and prevented a loss of bearings that would have made a completely new approach to the problems unavoidable. Only the humiliation of the dynasty by the eight powers that invaded the northern provinces during the Boxer War (1900) marked a point of no return.

The second possible answer is that China's state apparatus and the
shenshi
class on which it rested were less weakened than the samurai in Japan. After all, at exactly the same time as the dramatic developments in Japan, China's dominant class had managed to survive physically and politically (albeit with numerous casualties) the shattering social revolution of the Taiping. Around 1860, something like a modus vivendi was found with the aggressive Great Powers (Britain, France, and Russia), and this reduced the political and military pressure on the country for more than three decades. At the moment when the old order collapsed in Japan, it seemed to have recovered in China without the need for too many destabilizing reforms.

In 1900, however, when the fate not only of the dynasty but of the whole empire hung in the balance, sizable forces at the head of the Chinese state, both Han and Manchu, were prepared to undertake radical reforms.
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Abolition of the centuries-old practice of state examinations, hitherto the only mechanism for elite recruitment, was a fairly precise equivalent of the abolition of samurai status in Japan three decades earlier. In both cases, active elements in the elite undermined the basis of their own social formation. The Chinese reform lacked both the systematic character of Meiji politics and the foreign-policy breathing space that had allowed it to be implemented. When the dynasty collapsed in 1911, the not-very-large Manchu nobility lost its privileges from one day to the next.
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From then on, however, hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese gentry families were cut off both from the old fountains of honor and prestige and from employment opportunities in the central civil service.