I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
even the most optimistic estimates for Song population were met and surpassed by the Ming. and the view that Mongols just came in and killed everybody & burned everything is bizarre. they conquered, but every dynastic transition in China was ultraviolent, the Song did it, the Tang did it, the Ming did it. afterward the Yuan proved just as capable of governance and maintenance of infrastructure as their predecessors. for all the talk about Southern Song’s pre-proto-industrialism no one ever seems to appreciate it was lashed to a decrepit state that couldn’t even control all of China. bully to your paper money, page me when you can defeat the Jin.
but also have you heard of the Qing? with your scapegoating of the Mongols the Qing defy explanation. oh yeah the developmentally disadvantaged-from-1200 chinese just accidentally conquered the largest ever chinese state, including the mongolian steppe, a military success unheard of since the Han dynasty?
Right, my point is Ming and Qing had surpassed Southern Song despite the Mongols. I wouldn’t say Yuan was some great Chinese dynasty on par with Han, Tang, Song, or Ming. It lasted less than a century, which is subpar for a Chinese dynasty. The lasting contribution of Yuan was the idea that you don’t have to be Han to be Chinese, which was further developed by the Qing since both Yuan and Qing were conquest dynasties.
And as a final note, capitalism could’ve also started in Mughal India instead of Western Europe or China. I don’t think it was destined for capitalism to first come out of Western Europe. There were various candidates (Western Europe, China, India) and various historical events would eventually tilt the weight in favor of one candidate.
You’re applying a Han-centric view of the Mongol conquests. The Mongol Conquests resulted in the complete extinction of the Tangut and Khitan in the North, as well as the complete loss of the Jurchen script. These were major cultures in pre-Yuan China. This is equivalent to say Koreans or Tibetans going extinct. No other dynastic change has resulted in the complete extinction of multiple cultures like this except maybe the conquest of Chu, but even then the Chu were broadly culturally similar to the other warring states.
now you’re gonna make me defend the Mongols? they didn’t extinct either people, the Khitan were already on the decline and subject under the Jin. and the Western Liao were literally a dozen families, that were taken over by the Naiman Kuchlug when Genghis went over there.
e: and i may have been thinking of the Jin’s Khitan contingent but i really thought there was also a Yuan Khitan guard unit too. besides, the Eastern Liao were a close ally and afterward vassal of the Mongols, i have no idea where you got the impression of a mongol effort to eliminate them. they were mongolic cousins and just assimilated
Tangut got fucked, but still were around after the fact, getting mentioned in mongol armies.
but the Jurchen script was just based on chinese and they switched it out for mongolian based i dont think thats a huge thing
It was an entirely different writing system based off of Chinese and Khitan. Its relationship with Chinese is more analogous to the Cherokee script’s relationship with the Latin alphabet. Plus I don’t think it’s “not a huge thing” considering imo this is why the Manchu language today is near extinct. Imagine how European history would’ve turned out if every major Germanic culture was suddenly wiped out or had all their writing destroyed.
we’re literally communicating in germanic rendered with the latin alphabet right now, not the alphabet the germans used. that’s all that happened with jurchen/manchu, its marginalization doesn’t have to do with its script (and it could be rendered in others if people were inclined) but the abandonment of it by the manchu themselves as the ruling caste of Qing, and also the reactionary anti-manchu policies of the early Republic
E: but yeah ‘chinese’ isn’t the appropriate term for that first jurchen writing system, it just shared the common ancestor of the chinese and khitan.
Well yeah. imagine if in the middle of the Renaissance, when Northern Europe finally approached the level of societal development as Southern Europe, a nomadic group of Germanics suddenly came and assimilated/killed off most Germanic cultures. All works written in the Latin alphabet are lost, no Shakespeare, Martin Luther or Chaucer. The Germanic languages that do survive now use a form of neo-hieroglyphic completely incompatible with the previous written corpus. It would be a tremendous loss of culture.
I admit this isn’t much of a material analysis. I’m just lamenting the loss of all these scripts. But changing writing systems isn’t a casual affair, especially in the premodern world where document preservation is difficult and you’re not going to have people sit down and transliterate every old book they come across. One contributing factor to the decline of the Manchu language is the lack of a corpus. Most texts were merely translations from Chinese. If the pre-mongol Jurchen corpus had survived I doubt the Qing nobility would’ve abandoned Manchu as readily.
Well not really. The Khitan Large script was explicitly created in the Liao dynasty based off the principles of Chinese (which at this point was already identical to modern day Chinese), a second semi-phonetic Small script was then created based off of that and old Uyghur, while the Jurchens used a script based off borrowings from both Chinese, the Khitan Large scrript, and possibly the Khitan small script.
okay mongolian used sogdian, a very successful and not unsophisticated system. i’m not of the opinion writing systems inherently advantage/disadvantage a language on their own. prominence of languages is political.
i mean no problem with that, but i don’t see how the Jurchens are that special or how whatever documents might’ve burned in Zhongdu couldve saved the manchu language 8 centuries afterward
I’m not arguing that modern Mongolic/Manchu script is inferior to Jurchen script because that would be chauvinistic. I’m saying any switch to a completely different writing system, especially one working on completely different principles basically renders all previous text inaccessible. We can see this basically any time a culture transitions to drastically different writing systems in the pre-modern era its accompanied by a complete abandonment of the previous written corpus even if you ignore the specific mechanics of the writing systems involved. We literally have no Jurchen documents written in paper, despite the fact that all Song sources point to the fact that the Jurchens were a relatively literate people who had access to printing for four centuries at that point. If that corpus survived then yeah the Manchu language would probably be like the Zhuang or Yi languages today, which never had the political prestige of Manchu/Jurchen, yet still persist and have relatively good access to their literary canon despite attempts at modern reforms.
i’m not particularly versed in extant primary documents in the area, but is it actually that weird to not have paper sources from a century-long conquest dynasty? do direct song documents even survive or are they copies?
i know china has had unusual luck/care in the preservation of documents compared to say, europe. but i also get the impression not all periods are as well attested and well preserved as others. doesn’t Khitan also lack paper?
but anyway while i was looking for what i think i read about policies of translating documents to manchu under the Qing i came on this thread talking about the language decline