Empires collide, civilizations do not

The notes open on a rapid turn of history that, they write, oddly reflected the nineteenth-century Opium War, and on a Second Gulf War in the Middle East that, in their telling, made clear how little the logic of capitalism had changed. Major investment in the oil industry, they add, can in some family fortunes be traced back to wealth that began in the opium trade. They do not want a title about colliding empires to be mixed up with a clash of civilizations. Civilizations, they write, do not collide; only empires do.

To understand an army empire, they say, one has to look historically at the close ties among language, war, international law, the invention of a sign language, and ideas of the exotic, and at how the notion of the “barbarian” took on a special cross-cultural and cross-linguistic place in the military collision between the British Empire and the Qing. They also want to follow how that notion changed and was used in Chinese as a historical concept. A study of nineteenth-century semiotic theory and of the telegraph as a new military technology, they add, can support a semiotic turn in the reading of international politics.

Wheaton, Martin, and a Chinese international law

A linguistic expression of the Mandate of Heaven, they write, carried important meaning in the imperial ideology of the Manchu rulers. At the center of their reading is a nineteenth-century translation and spread of international law, above all Henry Wheaton’s work on its principles, rendered into Chinese as Wanguo Gongfa. The translator, they write, was the American missionary William Alexander Parsons Martin, who, around the end of the Second Opium War, worked as an interpreter and diplomat. His translation of that work, they say, was a historical event that gave a formal frame to relations among the Qing court, the Western powers, Japan, and Joseon in the nineteenth century.

Wanguo Gongfa, they write, showed its main readers — Manchu and Han officials — China’s place on the newest scientific world map. In the mid-nineteenth century, they add, resistance in the local language was still strong; a supposed equivalence between English and Chinese had not yet been set, and the range of meaning a word could carry in the other language was still quite wide. Someone, in their account, granted the book’s usefulness and still found the writing very clumsy. Before the nineteenth century, they write, Asian states had been members of international society; they were then turned into candidates who had to apply, or wait for the great powers’ recognition, after international-law theory itself changed, abandoning natural-law principles and taking up a European positive law.

“Barbarian,” Tianjin, and the Yuanmingyuan

To name the other and fold that other into oneself, they write, is a common deictic form at the start of colonial encounter. European talk of the “barbarian” let empires name the colonial other and, at the same time, firm up their own place as sovereign subjects. By calling American indigenous peoples and other non-European peoples savages or barbarians, they write, European empires built a graded order of civilization, and an epistemology of colonial otherness, on race, culture, technology, language, and property. The same title, they add, could not be turned back on the namer without breaking the hierarchical relation. British “barbarian” talk, based on experience in China, already carried, in their view, the colonial character of a wound discourse; and Britain’s legal justification of war was, they say, that character’s fullest legal expression.

Britain forced the Qing government to sign the Treaty of Tianjin, and two years later, the notes write, British and French forces occupied and plundered Beijing. They first looted and set fire to the Yuanmingyuan, the famous Qing garden northwest of the city, and then established a foreign-legation quarter in the capital. British authorities, they add, were highly sensitive to improper language, and regularly checked official Chinese notices for discourteous expressions. Negative portraits of Westerners, they write, go back to the early sixteenth century, when Portuguese traders first appeared on China’s southern coast and plundered and killed at will, including the notorious kidnapping of women and children to be sold as slaves abroad. Insult and the throwing of objects, in this telling, were less a matter of accurate knowledge than a way to recall violence and to rally resistance. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ reading of colliding empires, Wheaton’s international law in Chinese, W. A. P. Martin, and the Yuanmingyuan

Last updated: 14 November 2026