Impact and reply

The modern world impacted Asia over some three hundred and fifty years;

the newcomers interacted with existing forms of life (economic, social and

cultural systems); industrial capitalism1 was vigorous and so too were the

cultures of Asia. These exchanges were contingent; they were sometimes

violent;2 the outcome was not given; the patterns assumed by these

exchanges varied from place to place and from time to time. It was a fluid

evolving interaction; there were multiple agents involved; there were multi-

ple institutions (country powers, companies and states). These exchanges generated distinctive patterns (territories, states, spheres of influence); these

patterns deepened into distinctive empire spheres, formal and informal;

these in turn ran until overwhelmed by the general crisis in East Asia. The

Europeans came to Asia in the sixteenth century as their home civilization

picked up its energies:3 first the Portuguese, thereafter the Dutch, British

and French. Their expansion was marked by intra-European wars and a

multiplicity of alliances and wars with and against local ‘country powers’.

Local elites and peoples were active; they read and reacted to change; they learned the lessons of the modern world and many prospered. In time, as

global circumstances shifted, aspirant replacement elites emerged; the long

twentieth-century general crisis gave them their chance; and systems of

empire first were reconfigured and then dissolved away.