“In 1860, at the climax of the Second Opium War, a joint English and French army marched on Peking and burned the imperial summer palace to the ground. It was the most dramatic possible demonstration of the accelerating superiority, military and financial, of Europe over the rest of the world.
China was far larger in territory and population than either France or England, yet the thought of a Chinese force storming Buckingham Palace was self-evidently absurd. The Middle Kingdom had no choice but to submit to the Western powers’ demands, giving their merchants and missionaries the right to move freely throughout the country.
For the Chinese — who still dominated East Asia, and enjoyed an unbroken cultural tradition much older than Europe’s — it looked as though the world had been turned upside down.
“We are shamefully humiliated,” lamented a Chinese scholar quoted by John Darwin in his exceptionally wide-ranging new history, “After Tamerlane” (Bloomsbury, 592 pages, $34.95).” Read the review at the New York Sun.
