Asia

"At Achim [Aceh] every one is for selling himself. Some of the chief lords have not less than a thousand slaves, all principal merchants, who have a great number of slaves themselves. …This is the true and rational origin of that mild law of slavery which obtains in some countries: and mild it ought to be, as founded on the free choice a man makes of a master, for his own benefit; which forms a mutual convention between the two parties."

"The island of Bali in the East Indies (Indonesia) was a source of Hindu slaves for the Muslim world... India was also a source of slaves, for example with girls taken to Afghanistan and the Middle East and, from the mid-seventeenth century, forced labour moved to plantations in the Dutch-ruled coastlands of Sri Lanka."

"From early on in the history of Islam, South Asian slaves were plentiful in Central Asia and Persia. The conquest of Sind in 712–13 yielded 60,000, and the Ghaznavids of eleventh-century Afghanistan drove home hundreds of thousands from India. The servile population of West Turkistan included many South Asians from at least 1326, and Indian slaves were routinely exchanged for inner Asian horses. In the late fourteenth century, the Samarkand- based Timur the Lame killed 100,000 Indians captured before reaching Delhi, but still brought thousands back to West Turkistan. As many as 200,000 Indian rebels were supposedly taken in 1619–20, for sale in Iran., […] By the sixteenth century the southern neighbours of the Eurasian heartland became ‘gunpowder empires’, stabilizing Islamic power. Their armies or those of their projecting allies, the Turkmens, Tatars and Maghreb corsair states extracted infidel captives on a grand scale from India to South-east Asia. … The Mughals expanded further into southern India than any previous Muslim power, inundating Central Asia with Hindu captives. Nevertheless, these advances obscured structural flaws: newly conquered Christians and Hindus often refused to convert."

"There are no statistics on the overall number of slaves imported into Jolo in the period under consideration, except the estimates of European observers. These range from 750 to as high as 4,000 captives a year for the Philippines alone from 1775 to 1848. .... Slave imports to the Sulu Sultanate during the first sixty-five years probably averaged between 2,000 and 3,000 a year. The steepest rise in the number of slaves annually brought to Sulu, between 3,000 and 4,000, occurred in the period 1836-48, during which foreign trade was most intense at Sulu. The trade reached its apex in 1848 and slackened considerably in the next two decades, with imports ranging between 1,200 and 2,000 slaves a year until it collapsed in the 1870s.' The figures appear to show that between 200,000 and 300,000 slaves were moved in Iranun and Samal vessels to the Sulu Sultanate in the period 1770-1870."

"Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Muslims enslaved Hindus and Animists, and even fellow Muslims, from the thirteenth-century. Bali exported around 100,000 Hindu slaves from 1620 to 1830, and South Sulawesi exported another 100,000 between 1660 and 1810, mainly Muslims. Quite a few were acquired by Europeans and Chinese. Supplies of Animists from Nias Island to Aceh from 1790 to 1900 may have amounted to around 50,000, while some 12,000 Toraja Animists were obtained in South Sulawesi from 1880 to 1905. There are no figures for similar local trades from Animist uplands to Muslim lowlands, notably in Sumatra, Malaya, and Borneo. The proportion of slaves in nineteenth-century Muslim societies varied widely. Rare in Java in the 1810s, they accounted for 6 per cent in an 1879 census of the Malay sultanate of Perak, about a third in villages on the eastern edge of West Sumatra in the 1860s, 30 per cent in the Muslim zone of North Sulawesi, and two thirds or more in part of North Borneo in the 1880s."

"And I thought something else. I thought about the Church of England. My mind went back to Buckingham Palace, and I said that this is the symbol of a dying system. There was a day that the queens and kings of England could boast that the sun never sets on the British Empire. A day when she occupied the greater portion of Australia, the greater portion of Canada. There was a day when she ruled most of China, most of Africa, and all of India. I started thinking about this empire. I started thinking about the fact that she ruled over India one day. Mahatma Gandhi stood there at every hand, trying to get the freedom of his people. And they never bowed to it. They never, they decided that they were going to stand up and hold India in humiliation and in colonialism many, many years. I remember we passed by 10 Downing Street. That’s the place where the prime minister of England lives. And I remember that a few years ago a man lived there by the name of Winston Churchill. One day he stood up before the world and said, “I did not become his Majesty’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” And I thought about the fact that a few weeks ago a man by the name of Anthony Eden lived there. And out of all of his knowledge of the Middle East, he decided to rise up and march his armies with the forces of Israel and France into Egypt. And there they confronted their doom, because they were revolting against world opinion. Egypt, a little country. Egypt, a country with no military power. They could have easily defeated Egypt. But they did not realize that they were fighting more than Egypt. They were attacking world opinion, they were fighting the whole Asian-African bloc, which is the bloc that now thinks and moves and determines the course of the history of the world."

"The Commercial Revolution of Columbus’ time cleared the routes and prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. Discoverers refound old lands, opened up new ports, and brought to the ancient cultures the novel products and ideas of the West. Early in the sixteenth century the adventurous Portuguese, having established themselves in India, captured Malacca, sailed around the Malay Peninsula, and arrived with their picturesque ships and terrible guns at Canton (1517). “Truculent and lawless, regarding all Eastern peoples as legitimate prey, they were little if any better than . . . pirates”; and the natives treated them as such. Their representatives were imprisoned, their demands for free trade were refused, and their settlements were periodically cleansed with massacres by the frightened and infuriated Chinese."

"Take education from America, Military science from Germany, Shipbuilding from England, Jurisprudence from France."

"In the century that they have lived together, Central Asia and Russia have united through many economic bonds. But in spirit, these countries are alien to us. You can see this in their rising nationalistic impulses today. There has even been an international conference held on the need to form a single great Islamic state stretching from Alma-Ata to the Turkish shores of the Mediterranean. And this plan is by no means just a fantasy! I regard Russia's conquest of Central Asia in the 19th century as a mistake. Today I don't see any future for Russians living there and consider the government's top priority to be helping the refugees to resettle in Russia. Russia made a similar mistake, going back to the time of Boris Godunov, when she took on the responsibility of helping out Georgia and Armenia in the Trans-Caucasus, and thus got entangled in the interminable Caucasian war of the 19th century. We have no business being in the Trans-Caucasus, and we should be bringing Russian refugees out of there."

"Till the end of European domination the fact that rights existed for Asians against Europeans was conceded only with considerable mental reservation. In countries under direct British occupation, like India, Burma and Ceylon, there were equal rights established by law, but that as against Europeans the law was not enforced very rigorously was known and recognized. In China, under extra‑territorial jurisdiction, Europeans were protected against the operation of Chinese laws. In fact, except in Japan this doctrine of different rights persisted to the very end and was a prime cause of Europe’s ultimate failure in Asia."

"The treaty clauses, in fact, wrote the ultimate doom of Christian activity in China. To have believed that a religion which grew up under the protection of foreign powers, especially under humiliating conditions, following defeat, would be tolerated when the nation recovered its authority, showed extreme shortsightedness. The fact is that the missionaries, like other Europeans, felt convinced in the nineteenth century that their political supremacy was permanent, and they never imagined that China would regain a position when the history of the past might be brought up against them and their converts. `The Church', as Latourette has pointed out, `had become a partner in Western imperialism.' When that imperialism was finally destroyed, the Church could not escape the fate of its patron and ally."

"The history of European colonialism covers many centuries and takes diverse forms, but whereas the European explorers and conquerors of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania usually took it for granted that the local inhabitants could be enslaved or butchered or driven into the hinterland at the whim of the invaders, the literate nations of Asia were initially treated as peoples toward whom the courtesies of European diplomacy should be applied. At the end of the day these Asian civilizations were likewise mostly subdued by force of arms, but such conquest needed some kind of moral justification, a mythical charter. The Rig Veda as interpreted by Max Müller and his contemporaries provided just such a myth."

"Truculent and lawless, regarding all Eastern peoples as legitimate prey, they were little if any better than . . . pirates."

"In reality, however, it was a 'white peril' that menaced Asia - and indeed the rest of the world. In all history, there had never been a mass movement of peoples to compare with the exodus from Europe between 1850 and 1914… However, a rising proportion of European emigrants were now heading eastward. Scotsmen and Irishmen in particular were flocking to Australia and New Zealand; by the eve of the First World War, nearly one in five British emigrants was bound for Australasia; by the middle of the century it would be one in two. Settlers from Britain, Holland and France were also busily establishing themselves as planters in Malaya, the East Indies and Indo-China. Meanwhile, a growing number of Central and East European Jews, inspired by Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl, were moving to Palestine in the hope of establishing a Jewish state there. Finally, as we shall see, a very large number of Russians were also heading east, to Central Asia, Siberia and beyond. All this movement was in large measure voluntary, unlike the enforced shipment of millions of Africans to American and Caribbean plantations that had taken place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, comparable numbers of indentured labourers from India and China were also on the move in 1900, their condition only marginally better than slavery, to work in plantations and mines owned and managed by Europeans. Asians would have preferred to migrate in larger numbers to America and Australasia, but were prevented from doing so by restrictions imposed on Japanese and Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century."

"In the current state of knowledge, none of the hypotheses forwarded can be seriously demonstrated... There is in fact no evidence for the gradual progression of an entire material culture from the shores of the Black Sea to those of the Atlantic or the Ganges—unless, of course, we drastically force the data."

"There is nothing in Iran in the second millennium that is related to Andronovo, something which one would expect if the cradle of the Indo-Iranians were to be found in this territory."

"The most serious, obvious, and oft-cited objection against the northern Andronovo course is that the steppe culture does not intrude into the South Asian borderlands (not to speak of the heartland). Why, then, should one accept it as representing Indo-Aryan speakers intruding into South Asia?"

"There are no traces of Andronovan objects south of the BMAC, and the same is true in the Hindu Kush mountain passes that lead to India. As we have seen, there are no traces either in the Indus Valley. But since the current languages spoken in Northern India indeed belong to the Indo-European group, there is only one solution left to save the invasionist model, or at least the concept of an “arrival of the Indo-Iranians”: invisible migrations."

"Nothing allows us to dismiss the possibility that the Andronovians of Tazabagjab are the Indo-Iranians as much as the fact that they vanish on the fringes of sedentary Central Asia and do not appear as the ephemeral invaders of India at the feet of the Hindu Kush."

"In the same way that the Oxus Civilization disappears upon contact with India, the culture of the Andronovo steppes vanishes upon contact with the Oxus Civilization and never crosses towards the south the line which extends from Kopet Dagh to Pamir-Karakorum, which poses serious problems for historically translating the Indo-Aryans towards the South."

"We will notice that the traces attested today stop in Bactria... No Andronovian burial has yet been found south of the Oxus.... It should therefore be assumed that the Indo-Iranians, Proto-Iranians or Proto-Indo-Aryans got rid of this culture just as they entered Iran and India. The hypothesis is possible since, to arrive in these territories, they had necessarily crossed sedentary zones belonging to the Oxus civilization, whose material culture was much superior. The curious thing is that they seem not to have borrowed anything from the latter either... Clearly, it is very difficult to find a marker for the Indo-Iranian group."

"The hypothesis proposing a steppe origin for the Indo-Iranians is... internally contradictory. Its prolonged acceptance may be explained by the absence of critical scrutiny, much like the scenario realized by the child in Andersen’s fairy tale about the Naked King. Notably, all Russian archaeologists are well aware that Andronovo materials are absent in the south, yet most remain convinced of this southward migration. Some Western researchers have repeatedly criticised the steppe migration hypothesis, particularly the Kulturkugel model, and have noted the absence of Andronovo sites in the south. These findings are not obscure."

"The notion of nomads from the north as the original Iranians is unsupported by the detailed archaeological sequence available."

"It is this evidence concerning the western contribution which persuaded workers to advocate the view that the Andronovo culture area was the original home of the Indo-Iranians, from where they marched into Iran and India as two separate groups by the end of the 2nd millennium B.C. or the beginning of the 1st millennium B.C.. The Andronovo hypothesis was nevertheless faced with a serious shortcoming from the very beginning. The cultures of the Timber-frame Andronovo circle took shape in the 16th or 17th century B.C., whereas the Aryans already appeared in the Near-East not latter than the 15th to 16th century B.C.... These regions contain nothing reminiscent of Timber-frame Andronovo materials; in fact, the latter could not have been there at so early a date."

"To this day no traces of such stock breeders have been detected south of the Hindukush."

"Although there is a consensus among archaeologists working on the steppes that the Andronovo culture is in the right place at the right time, and thus is to be considered Indo-Iranian, there is neither textual, ethnohistoric, nor archaeological evidence, individually or in combination, that offers a clinching argument for this consensus. Kuzmina’s carefully constructed methodology simply cannot be applied to the Andronovo culture. The Andronovo culture is well over a thousand years distant from any textual tradition, making any linguistic and/or ethnohistoric attribution extremely tenuous."

"There is absolutely no archaeological evidence for any variant of the Andronovo culture either reaching or influencing the cultures of Iran or northern India in the second millennium. Not a single artifact of identifiable Andronovo type has been recovered from the Iranian Plateau, northern India, or Pakistan."

"With the recognition of Andronovo subcultures the identification of specific ones as Indo-Iranian has become an industry. Needless to say there is no consensus on the ethnicity of any single Andronovo subculture."

"Parallels between the material culture and the environment of the Andronovo are compared to commentaries in the Rigveda and Avesta and are taken to confirm the Indo-Iranian identity of the Andronovo. The parallels are far too general to offer confidence in these correlations."

"There is a tendency to treat the Andronovo as a single monolithic entity, ignoring the chronological and cultural variations."

"One conclusion can be readily stated: there is not a single artifact of Andronovo type that has been identified in Iran or in northern India."

"Passages from the Avesta and the Rigveda are quoted by different authors to support the Indo-Iranian identity of both the BMAC and the Andronovo. The passages are sufficiently general to permit the Plains Indians of North America an Indo-Iranian identity."

"Russian and Central Asian scholars working on the contemporary but very different Andronovo and Bactrian Margiana archaeological complexes of the 2d millennium b.c. have identified both as Indo-Iranian, and particular sites so identified are being used for nationalist purposes. There is, however, no compelling archaeological evidence that they had a common ancestor or that either is Indo-Iranian. Ethnicity and language are not easily linked with an archaeological signature, and the identity of the Indo-Iranians remains elusive."

"We find it extraordinarily difficult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India . . . where we would presume Indo-Aryans had settled by the mid-second millennium BCE."

"In the history of Southern Siberia the Andronovo culture was of special importance. Its most southerly monuments are to be found in the foothills of the Altai; the most northerly ones are in the Ob region in the zones between the forest and the steppe."

"It should be indicated that the available direct archaeological data contradict the theory, suggested long ago, concerning the intensive penetration of the steppe Andronovo-type tribes into traditional agricultural areas. Direct archaeological data from Bactria and Margiana show without any shade of doubt that Andronovo tribes penetrated to a minimum extent into Bactria and Margianian oases, not exceeding the limits of normal contacts so natural for tribes with different economical structures, living in the borderlands of steppe and agricultural oases."

"The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin, Sanskrit, French, Swedish, Persian, and so forth) or as the group of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens."

"Our knowledge of these migrations [that broke PIE unity] is very limited. On a linguistic basis, little can be said about them."

"The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south."

"It is presumptuous to say the least to claim that the migratory routes traveled by the Indo-Europeans from their original Homeland have now been clearly traced."

"We do not find any evidence for the diffusion of the entire material culture of the steppes to those regions where historically attested Indo-European languages were spoken"

"The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles’ migration of the tribes themselves."

"But in the period 3100-2900 BC came a clear and dramatic infusion of Yamna [= Pontic] cultural practice, including burials, into Eastern Hungary and along the lower Danube. With this we are able to witness the beginnings of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe."

"The archaeological correlates become some sort of labels or tags that one may employ in order to trace the supposed Indo-European populations. But, in fact, very little of the illustrative archaeological material actually exhibits specific Indo-European or Indo-Iranian traits; a question therefore arises: what is the relevance of archaeological material if any sort of assemblage present at the expected or supposed time/space spot can function as the tag of a linguistic group?"

"What does this prove? That proto-Indo-Iranian broke away before proto-Anatolian, since the latter family has the PIE term for lion and wine while the former did not? Or does it prove my Leophobic Secondary Pontic Steppe-Anatolian Sequential Dispersion theory, according to which, Anatolian speakers broke away from PIE due to the sheer monotonous boredom of the Steppes and moved through the Balkans to Anatolia, where they encountered lions (note that Luwian includes the root for ‘lion’). When the rump of PIE subsequently broke up because even the excitement of a slow moving, non-steerable cart was no match for the tedium of the Steppes, the non-drinking, killjoy proto-Indo-Iranians went east into the deserts of Central Asia and only lightened up after they discovered soma, while the remainder of PIE went on vacation to Anatolia to visit their long-lost relatives who introduced them to lions, albeit with this proving such a traumatic experience that they immediately fled to Europe and never went back. You may consider the above to be unsubstantiated ‘just-so’ balderdash, and you would be welcome to think so, but I would point out that it is no more simple-minded than the following: “they might have moved several times, perhaps by sea, from the Western Pontic steppes to south-eastern Europe to western Anatolia to Greece, making their trail hard to find”, which constitutes Anthony’s own double hand-waving non-explanation of how Greek spread from the ‘wrong’ side of the Pontic Steppes to Greece. Once you adopt his ‘se non è vero è ben trovato’ standard of empirical evidence based on duff linguistic archaeology you can argue for just about anything."

"Although the Brahmans of India belong to the same family, the Aryan or Indo-European family, which civilized the whole of Europe, the two great branches of that primitive race were kept asunder for centuries after their first separation. The mainstream of the Aryan nations has always flowed towards the northwest. No historian can tell us by what impulse those adventurous Nomads were driven on through Asia towards the isles and shores of Europe. The first start of this world-wide migration belongs to a period far beyond the reach of documentary history; to times when the soil of Europe had not been trodden by either Celts, Germans, Slavonians, Romans, or Greeks."

"Europeans today are a mixture of three very different ancestral populations: hunter-gatherers, first farmers, and a population with eastern affinities that was not yet present in Europe at the time of the first farmers. It was unclear when and how this eastern component arrived in Europe... ‘When we first looked at the new data, it was a Eureka moment’ ... ‘The eastern ancestry was present in every single sample starting at around 4,500 years ago, and absent in every single one before that time.’"

"The discourse about the Indo-Europeans was also dependent on the most powerful movement of the nineteenth century, imperialism. To an even greater extent than concerned the view of Semites, racism was present in the scholars' depictions of how the Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered a dark, primitive original population. The Indo-Europeans were presented as humanity's cultural heroes, who, undefeated throughout history, spread knowledge and ruled over lower peoples, and who therefore seemed predestined to remain rulers even in the future."

"Indo-European: a term borrowed from comparative linguistics and most usually used to designate the blond North-European race (Homo europaeus), but which may provoke confusion since in most of these regions, originally settled by the North-Europeans, race and language have not overlapped for some time due to the bastardization (Bastardierung) of the Northern European speakers of Indo-European languages."

"To be sure, neither Jones nor anyone else was wrong to perceive strong and systematic similarities among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the rest. The question is what one makes of these similarities, and one steps onto a slippery slope whenever analysis moves from the descriptive to the historic plane of linguistics. In specific, reconstructing a "protolanguage" is an exercise that invites one to imagine speakers of that protolanguage, a community of such people, then a place for that community, a time in history, distinguishing characteristics, and a set of contrastive relations with other protocommunities where other protolanguages were spoken. For all of this, need it be said, there is no sound evidentiary warrant."