Imperialism in Asia

Before a single British soldier set foot in Delhi, before Dutch traders anchored off Java, Asia was not waiting to be organized. It was already organized. The Mughal Empire governed a subcontinent of perhaps 150 million people through a sophisticated administrative system of provincial governors, tax collectors, and legal courts. The Qing dynasty ruled the most populous state on earth with a civil service selected through grueling examinations that tested knowledge of Confucian classics, poetry, and policy analysis. The Kingdoms of Siam, Burma, and Vietnam maintained complex diplomatic relationships with one another and with China. The Sultanate of Aceh controlled the western entrance to the Strait of Malacca and traded pepper, tin, and gold with merchants from Arabia to Japan.

These were not primitive societies awaiting enlightenment. They were old civilizations with libraries, tax codes, irrigation networks, standing armies, and legal traditions that predated anything in Western Europe by centuries. The Mughal emperor Akbar was debating religious tolerance with scholars of six different faiths in 1575, roughly the same decade that France was massacring Protestants on St. Bartholomew's Day.

What changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not that Europeans became more civilized. What changed was that they became more industrialized, more heavily armed, and more aggressively organized for commercial extraction.