Introduction

The once-mighty Muslim empires of the Ottoman Turks and Persians declined from within without much pressure from the outside. The Mughul dynasty in India was also in decline when European rivalries caught them up in a whirlwind of empire building by the French and British. Southeast Asia, divided into competing states, was forced into patterns determined by the growing trade ambitions of Holland, France, and England. The Pacific islands, with their scattered and isolated cultures, were also swept up in the oceanic explorations of the Europeans. Manchu China, the most advanced of these societies, was magnificently integrated but stagnant. To insulate this cultural self-sufficiency, they tried to maintain only minimal contact with European traders. Korea and Japan sealed themselves off almost entirely from the outside.

None of the societies described in this chapter, which ends with the first decade of the nineteenth century, had yet experienced the full challenge of Europe, which was the challenge to change and modernize in accordance with the European scientific and capitalistic experience. In the subsequent years of the nineteenth century, as will be seen in the later chapters, each of these traditional societies would again have to respond just as they had in the initial encounters described here. As in the first confrontation, the Europeans would set the agenda. But the various traditional societies-the Muslim Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Mughul India, Southeast Asia, Manchu China, Japan, and Korea-would bring to their responses to the challenge of modernization all the individual characteristics that they had on the eve of European contact. Thus, even though they all eventually responded to the challenge of modernization, they did so each with a special individual diversity born of a cultural pride in what they had once accomplished as traditional civilizations. The diversity of the modern world stems from this.