Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [99]
In 1449, Mongol forces dealt a disastrous defeat to Ming imperial troops at a site called Tumu, now a truck stop two hours north of Beijing. Humiliatingly, the Mongols captured the Ming emperor, taking him to Mongolia. Although the Mongols returned the kidnapped emperor to Beijing the following year, the Tumu defeat permanently shifted Ming foreign policy. From that point on, the Ming emperors grew progressively more xenophobic, resurrecting the ancient conception of China as the only civilized society, surrounded on all sides by dangerous barbarians who had nothing valuable to offer. Obsessed with the threat of Mongol invasion, the Ming emperors tried to seal themselves in, rebuilding the Great Wall and repeatedly banning foreign trade and any contact with foreign nations. By 1500, imperial subjects were prohibited not only from building seagoing ships but from leaving the country.
The Ming dynasty lasted until 1644, when ironically it was conquered not by the Mongols but by the Manchus, different “barbarians” from the northeast. Even after its mid-fifteenth-century turn inward, Ming China experienced periods of strong economic growth, fueled by its steadily increasing population and pockets of vigorous domestic commerce, particularly in the lower Yangtze valley and the southern regions of Fujian and Guangzhou.
But after the mid-fifteenth century, Ming China could not— and in many ways chose not to—compete on the world scene. Relative to the West, China declined technologically, forgetting many of its own inventions and never undergoing a scientific or industrial revolution of the kind that transformed Europe. At the same time, it allowed its once colossal navy to wither away, eschewing overseas expansionism and ceding domination of the world's oceans to the Europeans.18
THE MUGHAL EMPIRE: MUSLIM RULERS,
HINDU SUBJECTS
Ayodhya is a small town in northern India and, according to Hindu mythology, the birthplace of Prince Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, the perfect man, and the embodiment of truth and morality. On December 6, 1992, a Hindu nationalist mob armed with hammers and pickaxes tore down a five-hundred-year-old mosque in Ayodhya, claiming that it desecrated Rama's birth spot. The destruction of the mosque, built during the reign of the first Mughal emperor, Babur, triggered an outbreak of fierce Muslim-Hindu fighting across India. More than a thousand were killed by rioting mobs. For their part, Hindu extremists justified their attacks on the “children of Babur” as revenge for centuries of oppression under Muslim rule.
The Mughal Empire, which immediately preceded the British Empire in India, was founded by a descendant of Genghis Khan. (“Mughal” is the Persian word for “Mongol.”) At its peak, it ruled over the Indian subcontinent and parts of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like the Ottoman sultans who ruled contemporaneously, the Mughal emperors were Muslims. Yet for two hundred years they ruled absolutely over more than one hundred million subjects, approximately 85 percent of whom were non-Muslims: principally Hindus, as well as Sikhs, Jains, and Christians.19 Today, Hindu nationalists insist that the Mughals were brutal, intolerant oppressors of their non-Muslim subjects. Were they?
It is true that Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, rode to power on a wave of bloody zealotry. To defeat the great Hindu Rajput kings, whose troops outnumbered his by as many as ten to one, Babur inflamed the passions of his Muslim soldiers by calling his war against the Hindus a jihad, or holy war. To demonstrate his own commitment to Islam, Babur had his entire wine collection poured onto the ground and his wineglasses and flagons smashed before his men. This act of sacrifice is said to have infused his men with religious fervor and brought them victory at the decisive Battle of Khanua. To be sure, it probably helped that Babur's men had firearms while the Rajputs did not. In any event,