在十八世紀和十九世紀，日本是工業化/西化最成功的亞洲國家。為什麼日本能夠如此迅速地實現工業化並成功抵禦西方列強，而中國、印度和波斯等其他亞洲強國卻失敗了？
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Super-Saiyan-SinghDuring the 18th and 19th centuries, Japan was the most successful Asian country that industrialized/westernized. Why was Japan able to industrialize so quickly and successfully hold off western powers when other powerful Asian countries like China, India and Persia failed?
 ParkSungJunQuality Contributor |
This is a question that cannot really be addressed in a short response over the internet. If anything, this all ties into an old historical problem, which is usually referred to as the "Great Divergence."
The Great Divergence is named after a book written by Dr. Kenneth Pomeranz, where he examines how Europe overtook large established states in other parts of the world, including Mughal india, Qing China, and Tokugawa Japan, among others. The idea in question however is an old one, dating as far back as the 1800s when European historians speculated on why they were seemingly on top. What is new is the amount of work and research that has been done since then, which generally focuses along three lines of thought: what I would characterize as "inherentism," technology, and my pet theory (for full bias disclosure), the fiscal state.
Inherentism I would classify as the idea that something inherent in European (and later, the Japanese would argue, in the Japanese) peoples made them superior in some way to the other nations. Obviously this first manifested itself in pseudoscientific racism and Great Man theory, but some of its ideas to this day are still thought of and debated: for instance, the so-called Protestant Work Ethic by Max Weber discussed how Protestants are naturally harder working because of their belief (a cultural identity, in other words) and that was why the Protestant nations were outperforming the Catholic ones. However, these sorts of ideas have been challenged more and more recently, with most modern works examining historical data and concluding that rather than Protestantism being the direct source of economic growth, it was the increased literacy in Protestant areas-in other words, education, a factor that has been thoroughly demonstrated to be strongly correlated with economic growth-that was the primary factor.
Technology would be the second idea, that the Europeans had managed to get a hold of superior weapons and technology and that was what allowed them to succeed. The Scientific Method and the Age of Rationalism are usually mentioned in the same sentence, but it is important to note that many inventions up until the 1300s had originated from India or China, and that much scholarship was based out of the enlightened metropolises of the Middle East. Yet the apparent technological advantages of the East were not able to exert the same sort of political pressure on the West as the latter innovations of the Europeans: in fact contemporary accounts in the early colonial era demonstrate the utter disinterest the Asian empires had in European technology aside from their ocean-faring vessels and their muskets and cannon, some of which were acquired and utilized by these nations. But even as late as the 1700s the British were still borrowing technology from the East (the Congreve Rockets being one such example).
However, something we must consider in these contemporary accounts is ignorance. And one notable factor that we see omitted in Asian accounts is an understanding of European states and their fiscal policy. As DeSoulis mentioned, Asian governments were, by comparison to their European counterparts, extremely small and inefficient. They were typically very weak, the central government essentially offloading most priorities-from tax-collecting to national defense) to local provinces and the gentry. They also typically lacked a fiscal apparatus on the same levels of sophistication that the Europeans did. And this would result in financial weakness that they could ill-afford in times of crisis, from famine to invasion. And so you see numerous Empires collapsing from a financial crisis-the Ottomans, the Qing, and the Tokugawa being some of the more humiliating examples.
Where the Japanese succeeded was perhaps their unique circumstance of financiers: while many Asian nations either restricted or attempted to restrict their financiers (from prohibition of usury to general denigration of merchants in general) the Japanese feudalesque society was heavily reliant on merchants and lenders, such to the point that most feudal lords had working relationships with one or two merchants for most of their financing needs-in a sense, the feudal lord provided the political power for the "officially bottom rank" merchant, and the merchant provided the financial power to a feudal lord whose incomes were frequently impaired by poor weather and a shogun intent on crushing their financial strength in case of rebellion. The end result was that when the Tokugawa financial crisis came (spurred on by Western trade agreements, as was usually the case), the Meiji government already had a base of financial expertise-and most importantly, funds-that they could borrow from and utilize.
/u/DeSoulis talks about the relative strength of the Qing and Tokugawa governments, so I won't go into detail there. What I will mention is that from an economic point of view, the heart of Chinese economic activity-the Jiangnan region-was just as economically powerful as Meiji Japan or even most parts of Europe. So to argue that the Chinese economy was behind is not strictly true. What is more true is that the Qing government-and the Ming, for that matter-only collected about 5% of GDP worth of taxes, where other nations were collecting far more. So while the denominator may not have been all that different, the numerator was.
The end result was that the Meiji government-with its base of funding and its now empowered merchants as a base for industrial development-was able to both import foreign technology and also sell Japan as a modern country-the idea that Japan was just like the other European powers. Many Europeans had already been amiable to Japan-Japanophiles, or as some people may refer to them, "weeaboos," have been a concept for a long time-and the Japanese took no small amount of effort in comparing feudal Japan to medieval Europe. The apparent implementation of European institutions and technology in Japan further impressed upon the foreign visitors the "modernity" of Japan, although aside from the railroad and the enhanced state control it is rather questionable exactly how much of Japan had truly managed to modernize prior to World War II. The military victories that Japan had achieved over both China and Russia served to further enhance Japan's prestige as a modern country, although one would point out that China was even more behind than Japan was from a fiscal point of view, and that the Russian Empire was fighting a war with literally every diplomatic and logistical disadvantage possible.
In a sense, to finally answer your question, the success of Meiji Japan in mitigating European imperialism came in two forms. One was the superior fiscal and organizational ability of the Japanese state relative to larger but weaker empires like the Qing and the Mughals. The other was simply that the Japanese had managed to convince the Europeans that they were in fact modern, despite the fact that the society was still ultimately run very similarly to the feudal society that had supposedly been displaced. On the other hand, considering that suggests just how foolish their European contemporaries were to believe what I suspect to be a bit of a con job, perhaps they weren't so far behind the Europeans after all.
DramShopLawIn pop-history, a lot of people have heard the theory that Europe’s geography ensured a kind of Darwinian military struggle, that led European states to develop tactics and war technology faster than Asian states did. Have researchers given a name to this theory that I could look into it with?
The theory goes, the British Isles, the Pyrenees, Alps, Rhein, etc. divide Europe into natural areas that, once unified, provide a big enough resource base that they can threaten their neighbors. While these barriers also make it difficult for any one state to conquer the whole region. So the whole region stays locked in a standoff that everyone has to continuously prepare for. Whereas places like China or India, being relatively more open, would tend to either: 1.) be unified under a large empire that then wouldn’t have to confront powerful neighbors; or 2.) stay fractured into small states that don’t have the resources to develop powerful military institutions, because there’s nothing that would protect a nascent state from its neighbors as it develops into a regional power.
| ParkSungJun Quality Contributor |
This sounds an awful lot like the fairly controversial Guns Germs and Steel theory that Jared Diamond postulated. Personally I disagree with that theory strongly and that is because of several reasons:
1) China, Korea, Japan, and India have just as many geographic barriers that would have resulted in the same sorts of Social Darwinism that is postulated (never mind that Social Darwinism is discredited to begin with)
2) Asia to a large extent was well ahead of war technology than Europe-they were the ones that invented such devices as gunpowder, rockets, biological weapons, this thing, and so forth. What China did not have in its armies was standardization, regimental organization and discipline, and probably most importantly, lack of funding.
3) The most powerful empire for much of early modern Europe was that of the Imperial Habsburgs, who had a far flung empire that ignored most geographic rules: its domains included Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, the HRE, to say nothing of its colonies around the globe. This was hardly an Empire that was confined by geographic restrictions: if anything brought down the Empire, it was a mix of dynastic troubles and a declining tax base combined with the responsibility to fight wars against multiple opponents on all sides.
This makes sense. I suspected it had to be based on an ignorance of Asian geography. What fascinated me about the theory is that it seems a reaction against the ethnocultural essentialism that always comes up in explanations for the “rise of” “the West,” making it an accident of material determinism but still being as reductionistic.
ArainGang1India does not have any geographic barriers. The entire region is basically flat land just waiting to be conquered. The South is a bit more hilly, but relative to Europe, its not at all significant.
China is similar. The only places with major geographic barriers are in the South/West, where as op describes, there aren't enough resources to do anything (contrary to Europe).
The fact that Asia was ahead of Europe is irrelevant to the thesis being discussed. In fact, its expected that areas that lend themselves to large, unchallenged empires (like in Asia) will have the early lead, but that overtime, the crucible in Europe will out innovate, and thus outperform them. Regimental organization was one such innovation.
Nearly all the important regions of the Hapsburg Empire became powerful due to environments that perfectly support the crucible theory. Sure, once they were all joined together (not by conquest but political machinations) it wasn't as clean, but that's not really here nor there.
 artfulorpheusInactive Flair |
I'm sorry? India and China are full of natural borders, you may have heard of this little range called the Himalayas. Even beyond that, to say the south is "hilly" is an understatement, significant parts of the Deccan are more that 3000 feet above sea level with the highest point being well over 6,700 ft above sea level. India has 7 major mountain ranges and some enormous rivers providing plenty of natural barriers.
China is no slouch either, hell it has even more topological variation even if we remove Tibet, Xījiāng, and Mongolia, it has plenty of natural barriers. The idea that China and India were just flat plains waiting to be invaded is ludicrous.
OhforfsMost of Europe (which is northern European plain - from Bayonne to the Urals) has no geographical barriers to speak of. Interestingly, Rome, the biggest state, consisted of most of the other European territory, the areas which had some barriers, Balkans, Iberia and Italy with only Gaul from the plains area.
The theory does not make any sense.
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r/詢問歷史學家
在十八世紀和十九世紀，日本是工業化/西化最成功的亞洲國家。為什麼日本能夠如此迅速地實現工業化並成功抵禦西方列強，而中國、印度和波斯等其他亞洲強國卻失敗了？
這個問題無法透過網路上的簡短回答來真正解決。如果有什麼不同的話，那就是這一切都與一個古老的歷史問題有關，而這個問題通常被稱為「大分流」。
《大分流》得名於肯尼思·彭慕蘭博士寫的一本書，他在書中研究了歐洲如何超越世界其他地區的大型國家，包括印度莫臥兒王朝、中國清朝和日本德川等。然而，這個想法是一個古老的想法，可以追溯到 1800 年代，當時歐洲歷史學家猜測為什麼他們似乎處於領先地位。新鮮的是自那時以來所做的大量工作和研究，這些工作和研究通常集中在三個思路上：我將其描述為“固有主義”，技術，以及我的寵物理論（完全偏見披露），財政政策狀態。
我將固有主義歸類為這樣一種觀點，即歐洲人民（以及後來日本人會爭辯說，日本人）固有的某些東西使他們在某種程度上優於其他國家。顯然，這首先體現在偽科學的種族主義和偉人理論中，但其中的一些想法至今仍被人們思考和爭論：例如，馬克斯·韋伯的所謂新教工作倫理討論了新教徒如何天生更加努力工作，因為他們的信仰（換句話說，是一種文化認同），這就是新教國家表現優於天主教國家的原因。然而，這類想法最近受到越來越多的挑戰，大多數現代著作審視歷史數據並得出結論，經濟成長的直接來源不是新教，而是新教地區識字率的提高——換句話說，是教育、一個已被徹底證明與經濟成長密切相關的因素——這是首要因素。
技術是第二個想法，歐洲人已經設法掌握了先進的武器和技術，這就是他們成功的原因。科學方法和理性主義時代通常在同一句話中提到，但值得注意的是，直到 1300 年代，許多發明都起源於印度或中國，而且許多學術成果都來自中世紀的開明大都市。東方。然而，東方明顯的技術優勢無法像歐洲人後來的創新那樣對西方施加同樣的政治壓力：事實上，早期殖民時代的當代記錄表明亞洲帝國對歐洲技術完全不感興趣除了遠洋船隻、火槍和大砲之外，其中一些是這些國家獲得和使用的。但即使到了 1700 年代，英國仍在從東方借用技術（康格里夫火箭隊就是這樣的例子之一）。
然而，在這些當代的敘述中，我們必須考慮的是無知。我們發現亞洲帳戶中忽略的一個值得注意的因素是對歐洲國家及其財政政策的了解。正如德索利斯所提到的，與歐洲同行相比，亞洲政府規模極小且效率低。他們通常非常軟弱，中央政府基本上將大部分優先事項（從稅收到國防）交給了地方省份和士紳。他們通常也缺乏與歐洲人同等複雜程度的財政機構。這將導致他們在危機時期（從飢荒到入侵）難以承受的財務弱點。因此，你會看到許多帝國因金融危機而崩潰——奧斯曼帝國、清朝和德川帝國就是一些更令人羞辱的例子。
日本人的成功之處也許在於其金融家的獨特環境：雖然許多亞洲國家要么限製或試圖限制其金融家（從禁止高利貸到普遍貶低商人），但日本封建社會嚴重依賴商人和貸款人，以至於大多數封建領主都與一兩個商人有工作關係來滿足他們的大部分融資需求——從某種意義上說，封建領主為“官下”商人提供了政治權力，而商人則為“官下「商人提供了金融權力。一位封建領主的收入經常因惡劣天氣而受到影響，而一位幕府將軍則一心想在發生叛亂時摧毀他們的經濟實力。最終結果是，當德川金融危機到來時（通常情況下是由西方貿易協定引發的），明治政府已經擁有了可以藉用和利用的金融專業知識基礎——最重要的是資金—— 。
/u/DeSoulis談論了清政府和德川政府的相對實力，所以我不會詳細介紹。我要提到的是，從經濟角度來看，中國經濟活動的心臟——江南地區的經濟實力與明治時期的日本甚至歐洲大部分地區一樣強大。因此，說中國經濟落後的說法嚴格來說並不正確。更真實的是，清朝政府——就此而言，明朝政府——只徵收了相當於GDP的約5%的稅收，而其他國家徵收的稅收則高得多。因此，雖然分母可能並沒有那麼不同，但分子卻有所不同。
最終的結果是，明治政府憑藉其資金基礎和現在授權的商人作為工業發展的基礎，既能夠進口外國技術，又能夠將日本推銷為一個現代國家——日本就像日本一樣。其他歐洲強國。許多歐洲人已經對日本很友好——親日派，或者正如某些人所說的，“weeaboos”，這個概念由來已久——而且日本人在將封建日本與中世紀歐洲進行比較時也下了不小的功夫。歐洲制度和技術在日本的明顯實施進一步給外國遊客留下了日本的「現代性」印象，儘管除了鐵路和加強的國家控制之外，日本到底有多少真正在世界大戰之前實現了現代化還是值得懷疑的。第二次戰爭。日本對中國和俄羅斯的軍事勝利進一步提高了日本作為一個現代國家的威望，儘管有人會指出，從財政角度來看，中國比日本更落後，而俄羅斯帝國則更落後。在幾乎所有可能的外交和後勤劣勢的情況下進行戰爭。
從某種意義上說，最後回答你的問題，明治日本在緩和歐洲帝國主義方面的成功有兩種形式。一是日本政府相對於清朝和莫臥兒帝國等規模較大但實力較弱的帝國而言，擁有較優越的財政和組織能力。另一個原因很簡單，日本人成功地讓歐洲人相信他們實際上是現代的，儘管日本社會最終的運作方式仍然與據稱已經流離失所的封建社會非常相似。另一方面，考慮到這一點表明他們的歐洲同時代人相信我懷疑的有點騙局是多麼愚蠢，也許他們畢竟並沒有落後歐洲人太多。
在流行歷史中，許多人聽過這樣的理論：歐洲的地理環境確保了一種達爾文式的軍事鬥爭，導致歐洲國家比亞洲國家更快發展戰術和戰爭技術。研究人員是否為這個理論取了個名字，我可以用它來研究它？
該理論認為，不列顛群島、比利牛斯山脈、阿爾卑斯山、萊茵河等將歐洲劃分為自然區域，這些自然區域一旦統一，就會提供足夠大的資源基礎，足以威脅鄰國。而這些障礙也使得任何一個國家都難以征服整個地區。因此，整個地區陷入了僵局，每個人都必須不斷做好準備。而像中國或印度這樣相對更加開放的地方，往往會：1.）在一個大帝國的統治下統一，這樣就不必與強大的鄰國對抗；或2.）繼續分裂成沒有資源發展強大軍事機構的小國，因為當一個新生國家發展成為一個地區強國時，沒有任何東西可以保護它免受鄰國的侵害。
這聽起來很像賈里德·戴蒙德提出的頗具爭議的槍砲細菌與鋼鐵理論。我個人強烈不同意這個理論，原因如下：
1）中國、韓國、日本和印度也有同樣多的地理障礙，這些障礙會導致所假設的同類社會達爾文主義（儘管社會達爾文主義一開始就受到質疑）
2）亞洲在很大程度上遠遠領先歐洲的戰爭技術－他們發明了火藥、火箭、生物武器等設備。中國軍隊所缺乏的是標準化、團級組織和紀律，或許最重要的是缺乏資金。
3）對於近代早期歐洲大部分地區來說，最強大的帝國是哈布斯堡王朝，他擁有一個疆域遼闊的帝國，忽視了大多數地理規則：其領土包括西班牙、奧地利、荷蘭、義大利、克羅埃西亞、匈牙利、神羅、更不用說它在全球的殖民地了。這並不是一個受到地理限制的帝國：如果有什麼因素導致了帝國的垮台，那就是王朝的麻煩和稅基下降以及與各方的多個對手進行戰爭的責任的混合。
這是有道理的。我懷疑這一定是基於對亞洲地理的無知。這個理論讓我著迷的是，它似乎是對民族文化本質主義的反應，民族文化本質主義總是出現在對「西方」「崛起」的解釋中，使其成為物質決定論的偶然，但仍然是還原論的。
印度沒有任何地理障礙。整個地區基本上都是平坦的土地，等待著被征服。南部丘陵較多，但相對於歐洲來說，這一點並不重要。
中國也類似。唯一具有重大地理障礙的地方是南部/西部，正如前面所描述的，那裡沒有足夠的資源來做任何事情（與歐洲相反）。
亞洲領先歐洲這一事實與正在討論的論文無關。事實上，預計那些適合大型、不受挑戰的帝國的地區（例如亞洲）將在早期佔據領先地位，但隨著時間的推移，歐洲的坩堝將超越創新，從而超越它們。軍團組織就是這樣的創新之一。
哈布斯堡帝國幾乎所有重要地區都因完美支持坩堝理論的環境而變得強大。當然，一旦它們全部結合在一起（不是透過征服而是透過政治陰謀），它就不再那麼乾淨了，但事實並非如此。
對不起？印度和中國充滿了天然邊界，你可能聽說過這個叫做喜馬拉雅山脈的小山脈。除此之外，說南部是「丘陵」還算輕描淡寫，德干河的大部分地區海拔都超過 3000 英尺，最高點遠超過海平面 6,700 英尺。印度有 7 座主要山脈和一些巨大的河流，提供了大量的天然屏障。
中國也不遜色，即使除去西藏、新疆和蒙古，它的地形變化更大，它有許多天然屏障。認為中國和印度只是等待被入侵的平原的想法是荒謬的。
歐洲大部分地區（北歐平原 - 從巴約訥到烏拉爾）沒有地理障礙可言。有趣的是，最大的國家羅馬包括大部分其他歐洲領土，有一些障礙的地區，巴爾幹，伊比利亞和義大利，只有高盧來自平原地區。
這個理論沒有任何意義。
關於進一步閱讀歐洲與東方帝國的財政狀況有什麼建議嗎？