Clay Burell's Library tagged history →  View Popular

Faced with a history class in 2 hours and no unit plan for World War I to World War II, I found myself setting up a new Wikispace–”A Broken World“–and designing a project for a student-created online textbook, complete with embedded student video lectures and Skypecast interviews with academic experts–and it took me all of 30 minutes.

I really think that this project will be self-sustaining for the next three weeks or so, requiring little further planning for me.

I also think the students will learn much more, and enjoy that learning more as well, than if I had created discrete lessons for the whole unit.

Because their knowledge about these 'outer barbarians' was so limited and outdated, China's ruling class had no idea of the power or extent of the new forces which were threatening the empire. The prevailing view was limited and simplistic: since the European did not understand the Chinese values and norms, it was proof that they were not civilised but only motivated by crude instinctive desires.

The forceful intrusion of the West into the Chinese world at the time of the opium wars challenged this notion. It now emerged that the foreigners were also found to be cunning, intelligent and 'unpredictable' in their negotiations. Yet only a few enlightened men, such as the much maligned Lin Zexu, began to consider the West more seriously. Lin's subordinate, Wei Yuan, observed in his famous 'Illustrated gazetteer of Maritime Countries' (1844):

Do we honestly know that among the visitors from afar there are people who understand propriety and practice righteousness, who possess knowledge of astronomy and geography, who are well versed in things material and events of past and present? They are extraordinarily talented and should be considered as our good friends. How can they be called 'barbarians'?

But even this grudging concession that China was not the only civilisation had to be explained in traditional terms. Thus Wei Yuan, a reformist spirit with some admiration for Western technology, asserted that European power derived from the translation of the Confucian classics into Latin, which he claimed had helped Jesus to found the Christian religion. This seems to have been the beginning of a school of thought which believed that Chinese civilisation was the origin of all other civilisations.

After 1860, when China was weakened by massive internal rebellions as well as further Western aggression, a relatively small group of influential officials - the so-called 'Western Affairs group'- began to advocate policies to discover the secrets of Western wealth and power. They wanted to adopt superior technology in order to defend and preserve the traditional Confucian values. As part of this 'self strengthening' policy, the West became more accessible to literate Chinese through a variety of translation projects. But more importantly, official missions and resident ministers were sent abroad to assemble first-hand knowledge of the West. The first envoys to the outer fringes of the known world were required to keep diaries while abroad. When these were published, they provided vivid images of alien societies to a larger literate audience.

The official travellers made observations on many strange aspects of European life. For mandarins accustomed to travelling in sedan chairs or cramped and slow houseboats, the voyage in a luxury ocean liner must have been a novel experience in itself. Jerome Ch'en summarises Binchun's first impressions in 1866:

'Exceedingly clean, the Westerner spat only into a spittoon and flushed the water closet each time he used it. At dinner, ladies took their seats before men; no one overate; and everyone talked right through the meal. Soup was never sucked in audibly; nor was food chewed noisily. Everyone treasured his privacy to such an extent that his door was always closed and no one could enter without knocking on it and obtaining his permission first.'

His youthful companion, Zhang Deyi, provides much detail on a busy schedule all over Europe, with a frivolous interest in trivia. Everything delighted and astonished him, from the railway at Suez to the lifts and hot-and-cold plumbing systems in hotels. Although garbled and only half-understood, these two journals must nevertheless have been of considerable importance as the first authentic accounts of a civilisation comparable to that of China.

Christopher Columbus and the Córdoba connection

It was here in Córdoba that Columbus obtained permission for his historical journey across the Atlantic.

The relatively modern statue in the garden of the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos shows Columbus standing before the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabelle, asking them for the money to begin his voyage, which he believed would open up a much shorter trading route to Asia. The Genoese navigator had already been trying to raise money for his journey for seven years. Initially Isabella said no. But as Columbus was dejectedly leaving the court, the story goes, Ferdinand intervened, and the decision was reversed.

The journeys of Columbus began the colonial era, which inflicted suffering, slavery and death on indigenous peoples around the world. The diaries of Bartolomé de las Casas, the young Spanish priest who accompanied Columbus on his second journey, are eloquent, anguished records of the "cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see". It seems ironic that on the ruins of perhaps one of the most civilised and beautiful Islamic courts ever to exist, flowered the most brutal and bloody era of Christianity.