Over the past several months I have made my way through John Keay’s India: A History and China: A History, each an approximately 600 page overview of the history of the respective region. Keay describes himself somewhat apologetically as a “generalist” in his introduction to India, but suggests this may have placed him well to develop a synthesis from the work of many different fields and eras of research. Certainly his narrative and choices of key moments and players carries conviction and and impresses with its balanced judgment. The books are helped along by an easy, readable style, a dry wit not overindulged, and an eye for finding the best from his written sources.
From the list of other works inside the cover, I find that Keay has written extensively about much of Southeast Asia – I would guess beginning with graduate work focused on the British East India Company. I highly recommend both these books and would, given the time to do so, cheerfully read anything else he’s written. It is probably unrealistic to ask Keay to apply his methods to a completely different region such as the Americas, but I did even find myself wondering what he would make of that history on a similarly extensive time scale.
For that matter, though, India and China are themselves fairly distinct, if largely in contact with each other for some thousands of years now. As such, the two narratives offer fairly distinct political emphases. Briefly, “India” as such is an anachronism – the subcontinent was never unified until the British conquest and Indian nationalism is a weird amalgamation of deliberate British policy and native reaction – while China at its most disunified preserved a clear linguistic, geographic, and cultural identity all imperial contenders and pretenders have laid claim to for some three thousand years.
On the other hand, this should not be exaggerated, and some of the similarities, cultural trappings aside, are remarkable. As modern nations, India and China include not just the core areas of their historical empires – northern India and east-central China – but an additional ring of what in Indian history were usually openly rival powers and to China nominal tributaries but actually largely independent and threatening as often as not. Both volumes contain substantial information on these regions as well as the “mainstream” empires of the regions.
If there is an area I suspect Keay has not done full justice to, it is the question of religious an ethnic tensions, both historical and ongoing. In India, for instance, he describes the apparent origin and basic theory of its caste system early on, but it largely vanishes from view for the remainder of the book: Keay is more interested in the successive invasions and changes to direct political and military structures. In China, tensions over Han ethnicity are mentioned repeatedly but in most cases it is not clear what this amounted to practically. Religion, meanwhile, Keay treats in most cases as little more than an additional, even secondary, cultural trapping, apart from occasional interest in its effect on political shifts. The simplest explanation may be that he is reading modern multiculturalism into history: he certainly emphasizes toleration edicts where they are clearly documented, and the prospects fifteen years ago, when China was written and India updated, probably looked better for the continuing successful spread of multiculturalism worldwide than they do now.
Another curiosity is Keay’s handling of each country’s respective 20th century. China reaches 1880 30 pages later than India, but India is the longer volume, taking 150 pages over a time period China dedicates only 50 to. India covers the movements that would lead to Indian – and Pakistani – independence in detail, and traces the fortunes of those two countries with equal thoroughness. Chinese politics were no less complicated, and the movement towards independence, while substantially more militarized, would seem to lend itself to a parallel level of detail.
It is tempting to draw conclusions about the relative openness of India and China today. Certainly it appears that Keay was able to do more field research in India, and while he does criticize the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders, he seems to have taken more care with those egos than those of India. Mention of Tianamen Square, for instance, is decidedly oblique. However, I am inclined to put this down to a stylistic choice. Keay repeatedly mentions, and thus invokes, a standard Chinese practice whereby criticism of the current regime was considered acceptable when cloaked as, or referenced to, critiques of historical events. It will not escape the careful reader that Keay links old to new throughout the book, or that he draws – carefully – parallels between China’s historical and current bureaucrats. What is impossible for me to say is whether this conceit of imitating Chinese historical practice was intended from the beginning, or the product of later revision, if he realized it might not be wise to record everything a full account might properly include.
On one final note, it seems necessary to say something about the role of European powers. Purely considered as imperialists, Britain – obviously the primary aggressor in India but also the leader in the “trade” wars and treaties with China – and others come off no worse, if no better, than previous invaders. What does stand out is a fundamental element of dishonesty: treaties made intentionally vague, or deliberately broken, or “re-negotiated” on minimal pretenses or without any justification beyond implied threats of force or loss. On the other hand, from this and other recent reading, the picture that seems to emerge is that, while many colonies themselves were of course older, colonialism, as a recognizeable pattern or deliberate policy and distinct from ages-old human practices of conquest and settlement, is barely older than 1750, and as such, whatever its passing glories, can hardly be counted a success on the scale of centuries.
Romance of Victory 