Chapter 16 Margin Q's
3. Compare the processes by which Christianity and Islam became world religions.
• Christianity began the early modern period as a faith largely limited to Europe. • But by riding the currents of European empire building and commercial expansion, Christianity was solidly established in the Americas and the Philippines and, to a far more modest degree, in Siberia, China, Japan, and India. • Islam became more than a regional religion much earlier than did Christianity, spreading with the rapidly expanding Arab empire in the seventh and eighth centuries and then through the conversion of some pastoral peoples of Central Asia. • Later, the Mughal and Songhay empires helped to establish Islam more firmly in India and West Africa, respectively. Meanwhile, the conversion of Swahili city-states along the east coast of Africa expanded the presence of Islam in this region. • From early in Islam's history, Muslim traders and missionaries also brought the faith to regions beyond the control of Islamic states. • In sub-Saharan Africa, in the eastern and western wings of India, and in Central and Southeast Asia, the expansion of the Islamic frontier continued throughout the early modern era. This expansion depended on wandering Muslim holy men, Islamic scholars, and itinerant traders. • During the early modern period, Islam also extended modestly to the Americas, where enslaved African Muslims planted their faith, particularly in Brazil.
1. Why did Christianity take hold in some places more than in others?
• Christianity integrated most fully into regions where European colonial powers ruled, where there was an overwhelming European presence, where the established society had been defeated and disrupted, and where no literate world religion was already established. • It had the least impact when it had to operate with the permission of non-Christian rulers, when it sought to convert in a society that was stable and well established, and when it sought to convert in a region where a literate world religion already existed.
4. In what ways did the spread of Christianity, Islam, and modern science give rise to culturally based conflicts?
• Christianity is a strongly monotheistic religion, and missionaries seeking to spread it to the Americas frequently opposed the efforts of local populations who worked to blend Christian and indigenous religious traditions and assimilate Christianity into patterns of local culture. • The spread of Islam through the work of wandering holy men, Islamic scholars, and itinerant traders allowed communities to adopt elements of Islam while retaining many local religious traditions and ideas. To some more orthodox Muslims, this religious blending became increasingly offensive, even heretical, and such sentiments led to movements of religious renewal and reform that emerged throughout the vast Islamic world during the eighteenth century. • The emergence of modern science during the Scientific Revolution challenged the beliefs and ideas on which European political and religious authorities relied, leading to conflicts. In the nineteenth century, scientific thinkers like Darwin, Marx, and Freud defined the very basis of human life around struggle and conflict.
2. How was European imperial expansion related to the spread of Christianity?
• Christianity motivated European imperial expansion and also benefited from it. • The Portuguese and Spanish both saw their movement overseas as a continuation of a long crusading tradition, which only recently had completed the liberation of their countries from Muslim control. • Colonial settlers and traders brought their faith with them and sought to replicate it in their newly conquered homelands. • Missionaries, mostly Catholic, actively spread the Christian message beyond European communities in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In Siberia, missionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church did likewise. • But missionaries had their greatest successes in Spanish America and the Philippines, where their efforts were strengthened by an overwhelming European presence, experienced variously as military conquest, colonial settlement, missionary activity, forced labor, social disruption, and disease.
7. Why did the Scientific Revolution occur in Europe rather than in China or the Islamic world?
• Europe's historical development as a reinvigorated and fragmented civilization arguably gave rise to conditions uniquely favorable to the Scientific Revolution, including a legal system that guaranteed a measure of independence for a variety of institutions and unusually autonomous universities in which scholars could pursue their studies in relative freedom from the dictates of church or state authorities. • Western Europe was in a position to draw extensively upon the knowledge of other cultures, especially that of the Islamic world. • In the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, Europeans found themselves at the center of a massive new exchange of information as they became aware of lands, peoples, plants, animals, societies, and religions from around the world. This wave of new knowledge, uniquely available to Europeans, clearly shook up older ways of thinking and opened the way to new conceptions of the world. • In the Islamic world, science was patronized by a variety of local authorities, but it occurred largely outside the formal system of higher education, where philosophy and natural science were viewed with great suspicion. • In China, education focused on preparing for a rigidly defined set of civil service examinations and emphasized the humanistic and moral texts of classical Confucianism. The pursuit of scientific knowledge was relegated to the margins of the Chinese educational system.
2. In what ways was the missionary message of Christianity shaped by the cultures of Asian and American peoples?
• In China, Christian missionaries downplayed their mission to convert and were at pains to be respectful of Chinese culture, pointing out parallels between Confucianism and Christianity rather than portraying Christianity as something new and foreign. • Chinese conversions occurred primarily among those elite scholars who were interested in Western science and who were attracted by the personal lives of the missionaries and by the moral certainty that Christianity offered. While their primary goal was elite conversions, missionaries also attracted a small following among members of the general population who were attracted by tales of miracles attributed to the Christian God. However, there was only limited acceptance of Christianity in China after it became apparent that conversion to Christianity required abandonment of many Chinese practices. • In the Americas, especially in the Spanish possessions explored in this chapter, the Christian missionary message was more strident and less accommodating, which reflected the reality of European political dominance. Missionaries sought to convert the whole population to the Christian faith, drawing on the political authority of Christian rulers and the disruption in Native American society occasioned by conquest. They were only partially successful, as local populations occasionally resisted their conversion efforts openly but more often worked to blend Christian and indigenous religious traditions and assimilate Christianity into patterns of local culture. Elsewhere in the Americas, African and Christian traditions were blended in religions such as Vodou in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, and Candomble and Macumba in Brazil.
11. In what ways was European science received in the major civilizations of Asia in the early modern era?
• In China, European scientific knowledge was sought after selectively. Qing dynasty emperors and scholars were most interested in European astronomy and mathematics. However, they had little interest in European medicine. • Japanese authorities after 1720 allowed for the importation and translation of European texts in medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, and other disciplines. These texts were studied by a small group of Japanese scholars who were especially impressed with Western anatomical studies. But this small center of learning remained isolated, and it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that European science assumed a prominent place in Japanese culture. • Scholars in the Ottoman Empire were broadly aware of European scientific achievements by 1650, but they took an interest only in those developments that offered practical utility, such as in making maps and calendars.
8. What was revolutionary about the Scientific Revolution?
• The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary because it put an end to the idea that the earth was stationary and at the center of the universe, which had been the dominant view of the world in Western Europe. • It was also revolutionary because the laws formulated by Isaac Newton showed that the universe was not propelled by angels and spirits but functioned on its own according to timeless principles that could be described mathematically. A corollary of this view was the idea that knowledge of the universe could be obtained through human reason alone, without the aid of ancient authorities or divine revelation. • Above all, it was revolutionary because it challenged educated people to question traditional views of the world and humankind's place in it.
6. In what ways did Asian cultural changes in the early modern era parallel those of Europe, and in what ways were they different?
• In terms of parallel developments, both Confucianism and Buddhism developed traditions during the early modern period that bore some similarity to the thinking of Martin Luther in Europe in that they promoted a moral or religious individualism that encouraged individuals to seek enlightenment on their own. • As in Christian Europe, challenges to established orthodoxies emerged as commercial and urban life, as well as political change, fostered new thinking. • In Chinese elite culture, there emerged a movement known as kaozheng, or "research based on evidence," which bears some comparison to the genuinely scientific approach to knowledge sponsored by Western Europe. • In terms of differences, despite the similarity of kaozheng to the Western scientific approach, in China it was applied more to the study of the past than to the natural world, as occurred in Western Europe. • Cultural change in China was less dramatic than in Europe. • Confucian culture did not spread as widely as Christianity.
5. What accounts for the continued spread of Islam in the early modern era and for the emergence of reform or renewal movements within the Islamic world?
• Islam continued to spread because conversion to Islam generally did not mean a sudden abandonment of old religious practices, but rather more often the assimilation of "Islamic rituals, cosmologies, and literatures into . . . local religious systems." • Continued Islamization depended on wandering Muslim holy men, Islamic scholars, and itinerant traders, who posed no threat and often proved useful to local rulers and communities. • In part, the emergence of reform or renewal movements was a reaction to the blending or syncretism that accompanied Islamization almost everywhere and that came to be seen as increasingly offensive, even heretical, by more orthodox Muslims.
9. In what ways did the Enlightenment challenge older patterns of European thinking?
• It applied a new approach to the conduct of human affairs, one that was rooted in human reason, skeptical of authority, and expressed in natural laws. This challenged the aristocratic privileges of European society and the claims to authority of arbitrary governments who relied on the "divine right of kings" for legitimacy. • The Enlightenment challenged the authority of established religion, accusing the Church of fostering superstition, ignorance, and corruption. • It also challenged older patterns of thinking through its promotion of the idea of progress. Human society, according to Enlightenment thinkers, was not fixed by tradition or divine command but could be changed, and improved, by human action guided by reason. These ideas ultimately underpinned revolutionary movements in America, France, Haiti, and Latin America.
1. In what ways did the Protestant Reformation transform European society, culture, and politics?
• It created a permanent schism within Catholic Christendom. • It gave some kings and princes a justification for their own independence from the Church and an opportunity to gain the lands and taxes previously held by the Church. • It provided the urban middle classes a new religious legitimacy for their growing role in society. • It was used by common people to express their opposition to the whole social order. • It had a less profound impact on the lives of women, although it did stimulate female education and literacy, even if there was little space for women to make use of that education outside the family. • Religious difference led to sectarian violence, to war, and ultimately to religious coexistence. • Its successful challenge to the immense prestige and power of the pope and the established Church encouraged a skeptical attitude toward authority and tradition. • It fostered religious individualism as people were encouraged to read and interpret the scriptures themselves and to seek salvation without the mediation of the Church.
3. In what ways was European Christianity assimilated into the Native American cultures of Spanish America?
• Native Americans frequently sought to reinterpret Christian practices while incorporating local elements, as in the Andes, where dancers in the Taki Onqoy movement sometimes took the names of Christian saints; where people might offer the blood of a llama to strengthen a village church; or where believers might make a cloth covering for the Virgin Mary and a shirt for an image of a native huaca with the same material. • In Mexico, an immigrant Christianity was assimilated into patterns of local culture: parishes were organized largely around precolonial towns or regions; churches were built on or near the sites of old temples; cofradias, church-based associations of laypeople, organized community processions and festivals and made provision for a proper funeral and burial for their members; Christian saints closely paralleled the functions of precolonial gods; and the fiscal, or leader of the church staff, was a native Christian of great local prestige, who carried on the traditions and role of earlier religious specialists. • Throughout the colonial period and beyond, many Mexican Christians also took part in rituals derived from the past, with little sense that this was incompatible with Christian practices. These practices sought spiritual assistance in those areas of everyday life not directly addressed by Christian rites, but they also showed signs of Christian influence.
10. How did nineteenth-century developments in the sciences challenge the faith of the Enlightenment?
• Nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Darwin and Marx still believed in progress, but they emphasized conflict and struggle rather than reason and education as the motors of progress. • Freudian psychology cast doubt on Enlightenment conceptions of human rationality, emphasizing instead that at the core of each person lay primal impulses toward sexuality and aggression, which were only barely held in check by the thin veneer of social conscience derived from civilization.
4. Why were missionary efforts to spread Christianity so much less successful in China than in Spanish America?
• The political context was very different, with missionaries to China working within the context of the powerful and prosperous Ming and Qing dynasties, while missionaries to Spanish America worked among a defeated population whose societies had been thoroughly disrupted and whose cultural confidence was shaken. • European missionaries required the permission of Chinese authorities to operate in China, while Spanish missionaries working in a colonial setting were less constrained. Ultimately, missionaries in China lost favor at the Chinese imperial court. • Missionaries to China deliberately sought to convert the official Chinese elite, while missionaries to Spanish America sought to convert the masses. • Missionary efforts in China were less successful because the missionaries offered little that the Chinese really needed, since traditional Chinese philosophies and religions provided for the spiritual needs of most Chinese. Moreover, Christianity required the converts to abandon much of traditional Chinese culture. In the Americas, local gods had in part been discredited by the Spanish conquest, and in any case, Christianity was a literate world religion, something different from what had been practiced in the region before.
5. Based on Chapters 13 through 16, how does the history of Islam in the early modern era challenge a Eurocentric understanding of those centuries?
• Throughout the early modern era, the Islamic world maintained a central role in world history. • The Islamic faith continued to expand, mostly through voluntary conversion. • It also remained vibrant, with a series of reform movements and new traditions taking shape. • The Islamic world supported several powerful empires and maintained a central place in long-distance commerce. • The expansion of European influence had little impact on the Islamic world. • Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire expanded its influence in the Christian world, especially in the Balkans. • These developments challenge a Eurocentric understanding of the early modern era, in that the Islamic world's history was to a large extent independent of the Western European experience. Thus to focus on Europe would result in the neglect of the Islamic world.
