1368: China and the Making of the Modern World

by Ali Humayun Akhtar

A new picture of China's rise since the Age of Exploration and its historical impact on the modern world.



The establishment of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 was a monumental event in world history. A century before Columbus, Beijing sent a series of diplomatic missions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean that paved the way for China's first modern global era. 1368 maps China's ascendance from the embassies of Admiral Zheng He to the arrival of European mariners and the shock of the Opium Wars. In Ali Humayun Akhtar's new picture of world history, China's current rise evokes an earlier epoch, one that sheds light on where Beijing is heading today.



Spectacular accounts in Persian and Ottoman Turkish describe palaces of silk and jade in Beijing's Forbidden City. Malay legends recount stories of Chinese princesses arriving in Melaka with gifts of porcelain and gold. During Europe's Age of Exploration, Iberian mariners charted new passages to China, which the Dutch and British East India Companies transformed into lucrative tea routes.



But during the British Industrial Revolution, the rise of steam engines and factories allowed the export of the very commodities once imported from China. By the end of the Opium Wars and the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan, Chinese and Japanese reformers called for their own industrial revolutions to propel them into the twentieth century.



What has the world learned from China since the Ming, and how did China reemerge in the 1970s as a manufacturing superpower? Akhtar's book provides much-needed context for understanding China's rise today and the future of its connections with both the West and a resurgent Asia.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China

206 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 12, 2022

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5

It's been nearly three years since I left the minority majority bay area of my youth for the shores of another bay area with a 40-90% decrease in population of Asian Americans. I don't think I'll ever get used to the lack of food and fashion, not to mention the political vacuum that has given me a hankering for more actively informing myself in ways that contravene the usual propaganda machines, especially the Sinophobic variety. So when this book came my way, riffing on my still unread 1491 and all, it seemed rather exciting in goal and promising in focus, enough to merit the high price of entry (it's been a while since I was in academia, and my history of China will always be piecemeal) to engage with an objective take that factored the 21st c. alongside the 14th.

Alas, this text was all over the place, literary analyses of Malaysian epics juxtaposed against sociopolitical surveys of Dutch ceramics, engagement hinging more on the reader's personal interest than the author's infrequent interjections of 'and this is how this relates to the Chinese sphere of influence!'. To top it all off, the last chapters turned full Japan so abruptly and so completely that I had to turn back to the front cover and confirm that, no, it really was only China sitting pretty in the subtitle, not any sort of East Asian boy band. Why the author decided this was a better decision than, say, actually concluding with even the briefest of surveys of China in the modern day, I'll never know. In any case, this squidged a three star from me (probably more auto pilot than anything else), but I really can't recommend this to anyone solely on the strength of the holistic factoids I did manage to masochistically wrest out of it, for reasons of prolonged eyesight degradation if nothing else. Still, it did get me thinking about a quality history of tea and tea culture, well grounded in this text's international view that set Eurocentrism in its rightful corner (when it managed to stay the course) and served as a truly engaging nonfiction of vital importance: now that is worth keeping my oddly specific interests attentive for.

Some nine hundred years before the modern fixation on the quality of latte foam, Huizong's reign saw the rise of competitions over who could perfectly froth matcha foam.

[Fabius · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two fatal flaws. First, I was hoping for a little history of China on or around 1368. Sadly, the "making of the modern world" subtitle is really far more important than the title itself: this book strains continuously to be "relevant to the present". This is transparently done because "understanding China" in the present has become a way to sell books. This kind of cheap attempt at relevance does nothing but cheapen history. Second, the book is overly reliant on written accounts of the time (largely from Arab sources, which are certainly a welcome perspective on Chinese history!). This makes for a very limited kind of history -- largely concerned with "representations" of power etc. -- while saying almost nothing about either actual politics, economics, and everyday life. What's worse, it takes all of these sources more or less at face value, which is simply no way to read primary sources. It strikes me too that the author does not in fact have a particularly deep knowledge of Chinese history.

[Dan McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this to provide context to both of the last two book club books. The first was in-part about trade in the Indian Ocean, while the second was a biography of a Chinese artist.

The first 2/3s of the book I found to be exactly what I was looking for, discussing the wide trade networks and political power that Ming and Quinn China exerted in East Asia and the Indian Ocean. Including Zheng He and other members of China's large population of Muslims during these eras.

The final third really felt rushed, covering much of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries very quickly and focusing less on China and more on the European and Japanese influences on China. There was a chapter solely on the creation of maps and another on the modernization of Japan that felt misplaced or too drawn out in a book focused on China.

Definitely recommend it for a quick introduction on China's history prior to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, but skip a chapter if it's focus doesn't sound interesting to you

[Zack Whitley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, rather academic in its style and somewhat discursive. But Akhtar shows how influential China was during the earliest part of the Ming dynasty - its products were the envy of the world and a major draw for traders from Europe and Asia. As its products spread so too did Chinese culture and influence. The story begins at a peak of sorts for China's influence; the story, to the extent that one unfolds as Akhtar's writing style is somewhat plodding and repetitive, is of European growth. Eventually the northwestern European influence is immense. Although, as the author shows in the case of Japan, Chinese influence remains deeply rooted in Asian cultures even in the 19th and 20th century, western modes of thought and western systems were ascendant by the end of his story.

[Ernest Spoon · Rating 3 out of 5]

1368 CE is the year the Ming Dynasty ousted the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. It serves as the pivot around the beginning of our modern civilization through Ming and Qing China´s influence in culture, science and politics. This is a cultural history, and the Ming Dynasty is more of an eminence grise than an active player in this telling. It did clear up one common perception that the name ¨China¨ had its genesis in the 2nd Century BCE Qin Dynasty. It is not. Or may not.

[David Blake]

DNF...

[Kate Koeze · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good topic, a little slow