Journal articles: 'Oriental despotism'

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Shlapentokh, Dmitry. "Marx, the “Asiatic Mode of Production,” and “Oriental Despotism” as “True” Socialism." Comparative Sociology 18, no. 4 (October 9, 2019): 489–521. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15691330-12341505.

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Abstract Marx believed that socialist revolution, i.e., the end of the private ownership of the “means of production”, would make the state weak in the long run: the state would “wither away”. He also believed that the despotic state is related to Oriental despotism, marked by general ossification. Here Marx followed the views of his contemporaries. The socialist revolutions in Russia and China demonstrate that Marx was wrong: the end of private ownership of the “means of production” creates a state similar to Oriental despotism, but it is a quite dynamic and economically viable regime. The USSR’s collapse was due to Gorbachev alone; at the same time, totalitarian socialist China would become an economic and geopolitical global force in the future.

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Tzoref-Ashkenazi, Chen. "Romantic Attitudes toward Oriental Despotism." Journal of Modern History 85, no. 2 (June 2013): 280–320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/669734.

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Taylor, George E. "China as an Oriental Despotism." Problems of Post-Communism 42, no. 1 (January 1995): 25–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10758216.1995.11655581.

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Kurfirst, Robert. "J. S. Mill on Oriental Despotism, including its British Variant." Utilitas 8, no. 1 (March 1996): 73–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0953820800004738.

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European portraits of the great Asian states, China, India, and Persia, remained remarkably constant from the establishment of the Chinese silk trade in the first century B.C. until the religious and mercantile expeditions to the Orient prominent in the late Middle Ages. For more than a millenium, the Eastern empires had been classified by Europeans as stable despotisms – stationary societies governed by custom and tradition and devoid of economic, political, or cultural dynamism. Only during the Enlightenment did the proper interpretation of the merits of ‘Oriental despotism’ become a matter of controversy. To some Enlightenment figures, the paternalistic despotisms of Asia appeared to be superior to the nations of Europe ethically and in the quality of their political, legal, and educational institutions. Many social philosophers of the period agreed that the example afforded by Asia could contribute much to the rejuvenation of European society they hoped to effect.

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QURAISHI, I. "Kitezh and the Russian Notion of Oriental Despotism." Opera Quarterly 13, no. 2 (January 1, 1996): 69–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oq/13.2.69.

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Rubiés, Joan-Pau. "Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu." Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 1 (2005): 109–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570065054300275.

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AbstractThe issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is far from simple. The concept of oriental despotism allowed early-modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds which were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress, but political and moral. However, it would be incorrect to treat this as a pure European fantasy based on the uncritical application of a category inherited from Aristotle, because both the concept and its range of application were often hotly contested. By assessing the way travel accounts helped transform the concept from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this article argues that oriental despotism was not a mental scheme that blinded Europeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather a compelling tool for interpreting information gathered about the Orient, one which served a common intellectual purpose despite important differences of opinion in Europe about the nature of royal power.

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Rowe, Samuel. "Beckford's Insatiable Caliph: Oriental Despotism and Consumer Society." Eighteenth-Century Studies 52, no. 2 (2019): 183–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2019.0006.

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Popova, A. D. "ALEXANDER II MODERNIZATION AS A CIVILIZATION CHOICE OF SOCIETY." History: facts and symbols, no. 3 (September 14, 2021): 72–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.24888/2410-4205-2021-28-3-72-81.

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The article investigates the reforms introduced by Alexander II through the prism of a comparative analysis of western and eastern civilizations. The author maintains that, having long developed as eastern civilization, Russia is characterized by oriental despotism, absence of a constructive dialogue between government and society, paternalistic social consciousness, legal nihilism. The author assesses historical data on reforms implemented by Alexander II and comes to the conclusion that the reforms signified an attempt to converge with western civilization. Alexander II‟s reforms enhanced the importance of law, highlighted the principle of everyone‟s equality before the law, encouraged a constructive dialogue between government and society, and underlined the inadmissibility of plenipotentiary autocratic power and despotism. However, since it is not easy to change public mind, western innovations remained closely associated with oriental traditions, such as the importance of community, paternalism, and legal nihilism. The author concludes that though Alexander II‟s reforms introduced some elements of western civilization, Russian society remained essentially oriental.

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Siddiqui, Hasan Zahid. "The Rights of Subjects over the Kingdom: Situating the History of Rights in Early Modern South Asia." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 65, no. 5-6 (September 1, 2022): 734–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341581.

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Abstract Eighteenth-century critics of the concept of Oriental Despotism understood rights to hold an important place in the governance of Muslim-ruled empires. In asking what we might make of this idea, this article examines a tradition of speaking about the “rights of subjects over the kingdom” in sultanic India from the late fourteenth century onwards. This tradition, drawing to a significant extent from the writings of ‘Ali Hamadānī (d. 1384), articulated normative rights of recipience for sultanic subjects, often embedded in an early Islamic imaginaire. Sketching several iterations of this tradition over five centuries, the article argues that while the critique of the concept of Oriental Despotism, in so far as it dealt with rights, would come to focus centrally on the question of property rights, there was another, less familiar rights tradition that was left thereby in the shadows.

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Çirakman, Asli. "FROM TYRANNY TO DESPOTISM: THE ENLIGHTENMENT'S UNENLIGHTENED IMAGE OF THE TURKS." International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 1 (February 2001): 49–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743801001039.

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This study aims to examine the way in which European writers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries represented Ottoman government. The Ottoman Empire had a special place in European experience and thought. The Ottomans were geographically close to Western Europe, yet they were quite apart in culture and religion, a combination that triggered interest in Turkish affairs.1 Particularly important were political affairs. The Ottoman government inspired a variety of opinions among European travelers and thinkers. During the 18th century, the Ottomans lost their image as formidable and eventually ceased to provoke curiosity in the European public. They were no longer dreaded as the “public calamity”; nor were they greatly respected as the “most modern government” on earth. Rather, they were regarded as a dull and backward sort of people. From the 16th century to the 19th century, the European observers employed two similar, yet different, concepts to characterize the government of the Ottoman Empire. The concept of tyranny was widely used during the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas the concept of despotism was used to depict the regime of the Ottomans in the 18th century. The transition from the term “tyranny” to that of “despotism” in the 18th century indicates a radical change in the European images of the Ottoman Empire. Although both of these terms designate corrupt and perverse regimes in Western political thought, a distinction was made between tyranny and despotism, and it mattered crucially which term was applied to the Ottoman state. European observers of the empire gave special meanings to these key concepts over time. “Tyranny” allowed for both positive and negative features, whereas “despotism” had no redeeming features. Early modern Europeans emphasized both admirable and frightening aspects of Ottoman greatness. On the other hand, the concept of despotism was redefined as inherently Oriental in the 18th century and employed to depict the corruption and backwardness of the Ottoman government. This transformation was profoundly reflected in the beliefs of Europeans about the East. That is, 18th century thought on Ottoman politics contains a Eurocentric analysis of Oriental despotism that is absent from the discussions of Ottoman tyranny in earlier centuries.

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Siber, Mouloud, and Bouteldja Riche. "Native Mis/Rule and ‘Oriental Despotism’ in Alexandre Dumas’s Adventures in Algeria (1846) and Rudyard Kipling’s From Sea to Sea, Letters of Travel (1889)." Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature 1, no. 2 (December 31, 2014): 71–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.18034/ajhal.v1i2.284.

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Borrowing concepts from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), this article argues that Rudyard Kipling holds the same views on native rule in India as Alexandre Dumas does on Algerian structures of government. Both regard native rule as a paradigm of ‘Oriental despotism,’ which Orientalist scholars attribute to Oriental structures of power. Dumas asserts that Algerians owe their ‘misgovernment’ to the political influence of their late Turkish conqueror. Kipling contrasts native ‘misrule’ with enlightened British rule in order to legitimate British encroachment in India. Besides, both agree that native misgovernment fosters the spread of corruption and violence among their subjects.

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Beliaev, Dmitri. "KARL A. WITTFOGEL AND THE FORMATION OF THE CONCEPT OF HYDRAULIC STATE IN MESOAMERICA." RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. Series Political Sciences. History. International Relations, no. 4 (2020): 144–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2073-6339-2020-4-144-155.

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The article describes the evolution of the ideas about the of social and economic nature and political structure of pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica of the founder of the theory of “hydraulic society” Karl Wittfogel (1896–1988). An analysis of Wittfogel’s early publications shows that he initially attributed Mesoamerica to the type of oriental “feudal” societies that did not develop a despotic-type state. The change of this position was connected to the contacts with the Mesoamericanists like Paul Kirchhoff and Pedro Carrasco and cooperation with Julian Steward. Wittfogel’s theoretical ideas had an important impact on the position of Angel Palerm, who formulated his own concept of the emergence of urban civilization in Mesoamerica. The work of Palerm and Pedro Armillas, in their turn, contributed to the final formulation of Wittfogel’s views of the pre-Hispanic history. In “Oriental Despotism” (1957), Wittfogel suggested that civilization in Mesoamerica was based on hydraulic system and separated two regional variants. The first, defined as semi-complex (“loose”) hydraulic society (subtype L2), includes the states of Central Mexico (Aztec and Texcoco). The second called “marginal hydraulic societies substantial hydraulic elements” (subtype M1) was represented by the lowland Maya.

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Голубева, Лада Анатольевна, and Алексей Эдуардович Черноков. "Elements of Eastern Despotism in Athenian Statehood." ЖУРНАЛ ПРАВОВЫХ И ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКИХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ, no. 1 (March 15, 2020): 30–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.26163/gief.2020.92.11.005.

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В статье излагается проблематика возникновения и эволюции афинского полиса как феномена мировой культуры. С позиции социально-антропологического подхода к изучению государства и права выявлены факторы, обусловившие специфику афинской государственности. На основании проведенного исследования авторы формулируют конкретные элементы восточной деспотии, воплотившиеся в античной государственности, и делают вывод о том, что эти элементы оказали определённое воздействие на дальнейшую эволюцию Древней Эллады. The article focuses on problems of the emergence and evolution of the Athenian polis (city-state) as a phenomenon of the world culture. From the standpoint of the socio-anthropological approach to the study of state and law the authors identify the key factors that shaped the specific nature of the Athenian statehood. Based on the performed study the authors formulate specific elements of oriental despotism embodied in ancient statehood and conclude that these elements had a definite effect on the further evolution of Ancient Hellas.

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ARJOMAND, SAÏD AMIR. "Coffeehouses, Guilds and Oriental Despotism. Government and Civil Society in Late 17th to Early 18th Century Istanbul and Isfahan, and as seen from Paris and London." European Journal of Sociology 45, no. 1 (April 2004): 23–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003975604001377.

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Montesquieu popularized the notion of Oriental Despotism as the type of government pertaining to a lawless society based on the equality of subjects in fear and powerlessness. It typified Europe's Other in the age of absolutism. This essay does not examine the idea of total despotic power directly but rather the assumption of the absence of law and its guarantee of a sphere of civil autonomy and agency which will anachronistically be called “civil society”. While substantiating the emergence of a public sphere around coffeehouses, the growth of guilds on the basis of customary law and the development of educational and philanthropic endowments on the basis of the law of waqf, we also take the opportunity to compare the civic and educational institutions of the Ottoman and Safavid empires in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

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Chalyi, Andrii, and Oleksandr Ivanov. "In View of European: Vision of the East in Abraham Anquetil-Duperron`s «Oriental Legislation»." European Historical Studies, no. 13 (2019): 121–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2524-048x.2019.13.121-140.

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XVII-XVIII centuries determined by further European inclination into the Eastern countries affair`s. Due to old custom and to enlarge European understanding of the East, a lot of travelers made their own accounts about nearly everything the saw. But usually they didn`t understand the language, didn’t realize peculiarities of social order and receive information from only one source and moreover analyzed issues they had through the prism of European-based consciousness, that had created specific and inaccurate image of the East. During the Enlightenment such descriptions were used to create a civilization theory which stated about principal distinction between East and West. In popular form this theory is known as «oriental despotism», and had been postulated by one of the most popular French philosopher – Charles Louis de Montesquieu in his works «The Spirit of Laws» and «Persian letters». This concept consists of three elements: absolute monarchy, which is not restrained by any means, law or society, ability of state to confiscate property of its own citizen and therefore absence of private property at all, and absence of codified law. In not so distant future such an ideas were implicitly rooted in the theoretical background of full-scale political and military expansion of European countries, that ruined Asian states or limited their sovereignty made them almost a colonies. Nevertheless there was one man who stood against such theories – Abraham Anquetile-Duperron (1734-1805), profound French scholar, linguist, adventurer and due to his time – participant of French-Britain rivalry in India, who is now remarkably known for efforts to translate and edit Avesta, and thereafter being totally obstructed by his fellow-scholars, and now widely recognized as one of the finding father of French oriental studies and oriental studies generally. In his not so acclaimed work «Eastern legislation» (1778) he argued that so called «oriental despotism» has never existed, its element were based on false, incomplete assumptions, mechanistic extrapolation of European realities on the improper civil situation, banal exaggerations which had been made by previous travelers. Taking Ottoman empire, Persia and India (Moghul Empire) Duperron offer his own interpretation of the same facts, which were described by others. He stated, that in each of this countries have codified laws, which regulate all kinds of social activities, there is private property, that could be bought and sold and inherited by both male and female, and could be confiscated only as a penal punishment. All economical interactions are based on written agreements and religion is not as sufficient as his predecessors described. Monarch and other officials are being restrained by the system of rules which control each their step or decision, moreover their power depends on public recognition and charisma, which means in case they lose it, they lose their position as well and society have divine right to overthrow such leaders as infidels or tyrants. In spite of this Duperron makes his conclusion of invalidity of «oriental despotism» as an immanent and established type of ruling in the East. He emphasized that so called «oriental despotism» occurs only in time of collapsing of normal social life which were described. So force Duperron insists on principal equivalency of the Eastern and Western civilization types, which have the same core elements but differs only in its realization, determinate by geography, history and society.

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Klein, P. W., and Brendan O'Leary. "The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism and Indian History." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34, no. 4 (1991): 365. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3632458.

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Eliassen, Knut Ove, and Anne Fastrup. "Det orientalske despotis afvikling i Montesquieus Lettres persanes." 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 9 (December 9, 2014): 12–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/4.3234.

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Montesquieu’s Dismantlement of Oriental Despotism in Persian Letters.Montesquieu’s epistolary novel, Persian Letters, is often presented as a satire of the mores of the French under the reign of Louis XIV, and an early example of what became a well-established literary trope: the de-familiarizing perspective of the foreign visitor. Others have emphasized that the novel’s political horizon is best understood by taking into account Montesquieu’s later work, the Spirit of the Laws, and that the Persian letters anticipates insights that were to be more broadly developed in the author’s chef-d’oeuvre. While acknowledging the relevance and productivity of the latter perspective, the claim of the present work is that it is neither the particularities of France under the absolutist regime of Louis the XIV nor the despotism of the sultans and the shahs of the Orient that make up the novel’s central concern, but rather the demonstration of how despotism, by erasing the crucial political distinction between the domestic and public spaces, not only has nefarious consequences for the freedom and liberty of the citizens, but that it, in the final analysis, has a dramatic demographic impact that undermine the wealth and the power of the very nations in which it is the dominant political form.

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Cohen, Ashley L. "Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales." Eighteenth Century 55, no. 2-3 (2014): 193–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2014.0020.

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Zhang, Yan. "Governing the water commons in China: from historical oriental despotism to contemporary fragmented hydraulic state." International Journal of Water Resources Development 35, no. 6 (September 10, 2018): 1029–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2018.1508989.

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Bano, Shehar. "Karl August Wittfogel. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven, USA: Yale University Press. 1957 (Reprinted 1981). 550 pages. USD 119 (Paperback)." Pakistan Development Review 56, no. 4 (December 1, 2017): 393–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.30541/v56i4pp.393-395.

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Karl A. Wittfogel, famously known for his hydraulic thesis, was a German historian and sinologist. In his book, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, he has given a comprehensible account of social, political, and economic history of Asian societies. The book offers a study of the development of totalitarian rule in hydraulic societies. He refers to the Asian societies as hydraulic societies, as they control the population by maintaining control over supply of water and irrigation system. The book focuses on different factors that invited totalitarian rule in these societies. Influenced by the classical economists, Wittfogel argues that large irrigation systems tend to win large lands and an expansion and acquirement of large areas is the development of managerial form of administration.

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Smith, Blake. "Myths of South Asian Stasis." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59, no. 4 (October 4, 2016): 499–530. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341406.

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During the eighteenth century, European trade with Asia was characterized by the importation of sophisticated manufactured goods in exchange for silver. The features of Euro-Asian trade testify to the vitality of the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese economies in the period before the Great Divergence. Many European observers, however, mistook them for symptoms of economic stasis, purportedly caused by Oriental despotism. Investigating French descriptions of the South Asian economy articulated in debates concerning both the export of silver and competition with South Asian textiles, this article reads Orientalist stereotypes about economic dysfunction as responses to the challenges posed by the Subcontinent’s dynamism and as part of the rhetorical strategies by which European divergence from Asia could be imagined, anticipated, and pursued.

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Pham, J. Peter. "Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and Indiaby Michael Curtis." American Foreign Policy Interests 31, no. 6 (December 2009): 415–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10803920903417779.

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Craiutu, Aurelian. "Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India." Society 47, no. 3 (March 27, 2010): 265–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-010-9307-5.

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Isstaif, A. N. "Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India * By Michael Curtis." Journal of Islamic Studies 22, no. 3 (August 27, 2011): 468–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jis/etr074.

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Sutherland, Heather. "The Identification of Regions in Colonial South-East Asia." Itinerario 9, no. 1 (March 1985): 124–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0165115300003466.

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In recent years there has been a growing stream of criticism concerning too easy acceptance of conventional wisdom in scholarly approaches to Third World countries, and a number of studies have examined the intellectual lineages of attitudes and concepts. Edward Said's work onOrientalism, evaluations of the colonial function of much anthropology, new looks at Marxist approaches to Asia and Western perceptions of Islam together form a powerful warning against assumptions that we actually know what we are talking about. The problem is, of course, that false images are not arbitrary creations, but grow out of certain traditions and their purposes in certain politico-economic contexts. While the concept of “region” is relatively innocuous, and lacks the ideological centrality of notions such as “oriental despotism,” “caste and tribe,” “the village” or even “adat”, it is nonetheless worth remembering that regional studies also developed within a certain intellectual and political climate.

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Grigoriadis, Ioannis N. "Villain or Hero? Shifting Views of Abdülhamid ii and His Era in Republican Turkey." Turkish Historical Review 13, no. 1-2 (October 7, 2022): 141–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18775462-bja10039.

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Abstract Narratives and representations of the past in the present sometimes tell us more about the present than the past itself. Views of Ottoman history have varied in republican Turkey, according to political and ideological circumstances. The era of Sultan Abdülhamid ii has remained one of the most contested ones. While classic republican Turkish historiography has identified the Hamidian era with Oriental despotism, blamed it for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, but exonerated it for the killings of Armenians, recent historical interest in the era has been revisionist. Some scholars offer a more balanced evaluation of the Hamidian period, while other approaches move to the opposite extreme, aggrandizing Sultan Abdülhamid ii and his era and also pointing to alleged Young Turk treason. These approaches have coincided with a re-evaluation of the ideological foundations of republican Turkey and the re-emergence of a cult of personality in mainstream Turkish politics.

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Jacobsen, Stefan Gaarsmand. "Limits to Despotism: Idealizations of Chinese Governance and Legitimizations of Absolutist Europe." Journal of Early Modern History 17, no. 4 (2013): 347–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342370.

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Abstract The term “oriental despotism” was used to describe all larger Asian empires in eighteenth century Europe. It was meaningful to use about the Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese empires. However, this did not mean that all Europeans writing on Asian empires implied that they were all tyrannies with no political qualities. The Chinese system of government received great interest among early modern political thinkers in Europe ever since it was described in the reports that Jesuit missionaries had sent back from China in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The descriptions of an ethical and political bond between emperor and administrators in China and of specific administrative organs in which age-old principles were managed made a great impression on many European readers of these reports. Although it did not remain an undisputed belief in Europe, many intellectuals held China to be a model of how the power of a sovereign could be limited or curbed within an absolutist system of government. This article investigates three cases of how the models of China were conceived by theorists reading Jesuit reports and how they subsequently strategically communicated this model to the courts of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. These three ambitious European monarchies have been regarded to give rise to a form of “enlightened absolutism” that formed a tradition different from those of England and France, the states whose administrative systems formed the most powerful models in this period. Rather than describing the early modern theories about China’s despotism as a narrative parallel, but unrelated to the development of policy programs of the respective states, this article documents how certain elements of the model of China were integrated in the political writings of Frederick II of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, and Catherine II of Russia. Thus, in addition to the history of political thought on China, the article adds a new perspective to how these monarchs argued for fiscal reforms and a centralization and professionalization of their administrations.

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Pradella, Lucia. "Postcolonial Theory and the Making of the World Working Class." Critical Sociology 43, no. 4-5 (February 29, 2016): 573–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0896920516628307.

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This article addresses the two main roots of postcolonial criticisms of Marx as a Eurocentric thinker, that is, the closely interrelated views that his value theory is restricted to a national level and that his concept of AMP implies the inferiority of Asia. The article first investigates how classical political economy set the stage for a materialist understanding of capitalism and of history, while contradictorily grounding methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. Drawing on the still partially unpublished Marx’s London Notebooks (1850–53), the article then argues that Marx consistently developed the labour theory of value at the international level. In the summer of 1853, moreover, he put in question Bernier’s theory of Oriental despotism, paying increasing attention to the concrete situation of the population in India and to forms of anti-colonial resistance. By overcoming atomistic and unilinear views of development, the article argues, Marx was able to recognize the material seeds of interdependence and collective power of an emerging world working class.

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Nepomnin, Oleg E. "The political system of the Qing empire." Oriental Courier, no. 1-2 (2021): 46. http://dx.doi.org/10.18254/s268684310015777-2.

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Nepomnin O. E. (1935-2020), sinologist and orientalist with wide research interests, belonged to the most prominent theorists of the development of Eastern societies. In April 2021, based on the Department of the History of the East of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the seminar named after Nepomnin O. E. — “Discussion problems of the history of the East” began its work. The seminar continues the tradition of scientific events dedicated to a broad discussion of controversial issues of Eastern history from ancient times to the present day. Continuing the topics raised by the author in previous issues: the cyclical nature of the historical process in China [Nepomnin, 2019] and its differences from the development of statehood in Japan [Nepomnin, 2020], this article is devoted to the analysis of the political structure in the Qing Empire. The author examines the despotism of imperial China, decomposing it into the components “power-property” and “class-state” and comparing it with political processes in the medieval West. The powerful state machine of the Qing Empire, suppressing any manifestations of the autonomy of the population, did not give a chance for the emergence of a class of active “private traders”, a religion that could be opposed to the state, or free cities. Nepomnin O. E. concludes that in the conditions of a ubiquitous state and an inert society, the Chinese despotism preserved itself — and the Western linear path of development was inaccessible to China for a long time. China walked in a circle, avoiding crises that allowed it to enter a new round of formational development.

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Brownstein, Lewis. "A Review of: “Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India.By Michael Curtis.”." Journal of the Middle East and Africa 2, no. 1 (January 2011): 125–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21520844.2011.566163.

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Kurfirst, Robert. "John Stuart Mill's Asian Parable." Canadian Journal of Political Science 34, no. 3 (September 2001): 601–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000842390177802x.

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While certainly not the first to portray Asian civilizations as stagnant societies, John Stuart Mill was quite adept at using the concept of ''Oriental despotism'' to warn the West that it might suffer a similar fate if its distinguishing features of individuality and political pluralism fell into a state of neglect. Such a state was imminent, Mill believed, because the tyranny of majority opinion had already begun to hold sway in most Western cultures, and centralized bureaucratic socialism appeared ready to take root in some of them. Also problematic was the fact that the democratic franchise had spread too far and too fast in his lifetime, as had a single-minded focus on material gain. Taken together, Mill feared, these last two features threatened to trap the West in a leaderless age of transition for decades and, perhaps, generations. In retrospect, however, it appears that they helped inaugurate a new ''natural'' state, in Mill's parlance, organized around the needs of the industrial economy, that has captivated the liberal project of human improvement central to his social and political thought.

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İrvin Cemil Schick. "Sultan Abdülhamid II from the Pen of his Detractors: Oriental Despotism and the Sexualization of the Ancien Régime." Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 5, no. 2 (2018): 47. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.5.2.06.

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Gregg, Amanda. "After Oriental Despotism: Eurasian Growth in a Global Perspective. By Alessandro Stanziani. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Pp. viii, 183, $34.95, paperback." Journal of Economic History 76, no. 3 (August 30, 2016): 961–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022050716000681.

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Babinskas, Nerijus. "Henri H. Stahl’s conception of historical sociology and the Bucharest School of Sociology." Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies 2, no. 1 (August 15, 2010): 69–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.53604/rjbns.v2i1_6.

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The Romanian school of sociology founded by Dimitrie Gusti was a favorable medium for elaborating theoretic ideas. The school became a cradle for at least two prominent theoreticians (Henri H. Stahl and Traian Herseni) whose conceptions are worth of attention not only from sociologists but for the theoretically minded historians, too. We should keep in our mind that according to the methodological attitudes of the Bucharest school field researches were highly encouraged. It means that any generalizations, theoretic suggestions or entire conceptions produced by the followers of Gusti were solidly based on empirical data. Stahl started to elaborate his conception of tributalism in the 1960s. Coincidently, at this period the international discussion about the so-called Asiatic mode of production revived so the Stahl‘s theoretic ideas were well-timed. Stahl was not the only Romanian scholar who got involved in the discussion, but his conception was more original: according to him, tributalism should be treated as something different from Oriental despotism although there were some obvious similarities between the two. Despite the fact that the majority of Romanian historian community ignored the Stahl’s innovative conception, there were some attempts in Romania as well as abroad to elaborate (Daniel Chirot) or at least to popularize (Miron Constantinescu, Constantin Daniel) his ideas.

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ROSENBERG, CLIFFORD. "Population Politics, Power and the Problem of Modernity in Stephen Kotkin'sMagnetic Mountain." Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (April 2, 2014): 193–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0960777314000095.

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Did population policy under Stalin differ, in any fundamental respect, from those of inter-war France or other Western countries? In a radical rethinking of the Soviet experience, Stephen Kotkin said no.Magnetic Mountainmoved the field of Soviet history past an increasingly sterile cold war standoff between the so-called new social history and the totalitarian school. With the social history generation, Kotkin insisted on seeing the Soviet project from the perspective of ordinary people, subject to the same kind of forces that applied throughout Europe. He had no truck with ideas like oriental despotism or Russian exceptionalism, but, with the totalitarian school, he took ideology seriously, presenting everyday life and high politics within a single analytical frame. To do so, he drew eclectically on a range of theoretical perspectives, above all on the work of the late Michel Foucault. Foucault often implied that Auschwitz and the Gulag were the logical outcome of the Enlightenment project, but his primary goal was to illuminate the corrosive, coercive nature of liberal reform efforts in Western Europe, to puncture their claims to universality. The vast bulk of his corpus avoided the twentieth century. Kotkin, by contrast, used Foucault's perspective directly on the Soviet system itself.

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Siber, Mouloud, and Bouteldja Riche. "Native Mis/Rule and ‘Oriental Despotism’ in Alexandre Dumas’s Adventures in Algeria (1846) and Rudyard Kipling’s From Sea to Sea, Letters of Travel (1889)." Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature 1, no. 2 (August 30, 2014): 71. http://dx.doi.org/10.18034/ajhal.v1i2.356.

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Mottale, Morris. "Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India, Michael Curtis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 382, ix." Canadian Journal of Political Science 43, no. 2 (May 28, 2010): 503–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008423910000272.

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Rapp, John A. "The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism and Indian History. By Brendan O'Leary, with a Foreword by Ernest Gellner. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989." Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (February 1991): 118–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2057482.

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McBeath, Gerald A. "Democratizing Oriental Despotism: China from 4 May 1919 to 4 June 1989 and Taiwan from 28 February 1947 to 28 June 1990 (review)." China Review International 4, no. 2 (1997): 357–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cri.1997.0148.

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БАРБЕНКО, Ярослав Александрович. "Материалы обследования кафедры китайского языка ДВГУ, декабрь 1935 – январь 1936 годов. Часть 1." Известия Восточного института 48, no. 1 (2021): 89–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.24866/2542-1611/2021-1/89-113.

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“Oriental Institute Journal” publishes a series of documents related to the dramatic pages in the history of the Far Eastern University and the Russian higher school as a whole. One of the indicative situations that reveal the atmosphere of that time is a set of documents stored in the Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East. These are the documents related to the internal audit of the educational activities of the staff of the Department of Chinese Studies, conducted in December 1935 – January 1936. The audit was initiated by M. Potapov's note in the university newspaper (Fig. 1). The author, on behalf of Chinese-learning students, reproaches the teachers (Rudakov and Zhang are mentioned) for despotism and formalism, evading the decisions of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government. In response, the faculty administration organized an audit of the work of the Department of Chinese Studies, authorizing K. P. Feklin, an employee of the Department of Japanese Studies, and student activists (Potapov and Denishchenko). The “inspection team” presented several analytical and summarizing documents: materials, conclusions, and practical proposals. In these documents, the work of teachers A. V. Rudakov, T. D. Chervonetsky, and Zhang Yue Ren was criticized. As a result, A. V. Rudakov (Fig. 2) and T. D. Chervonetsky (Fig. 3) presented explanatory notes to the administration of the faculty and the university. The publication of the entire series of documents is scheduled for four issues in 2021.

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Kuhrt, Amélie T. L. "The Achaemenid Empire: a Babylonian perspective." Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 34 (1988): 60–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0068673500005058.

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For over 2000 years views of the Persian empire founded by Cyrus c. 550 B.C. and conquered by Alexander in the space of ten years between 334 and 323 have been constructed on the basis of Greek literary sources (in which I would include historical works, such as Herodotus' histories) and some sections of the Old Testament. Despite the fundamental ‘honesty’ of Herodotus' account, the fact that the focus of his history centered on the Greco-Persian conflict of 480/79 and aimed to explain the unexpected Persian defeat which had such enormous repercussions for Greek political and cultural development, means that his work serves to commemorate for us the ineffectiveness of the Achaemenid style of imperialism and to emphasize its ultimate failure. A failure epitomized at the very end of Herodotus' work (9.122), where Cyrus, the wise ‘father’ of the empire, is made to utter a prophetic warning about the enfeebling dangers of successful imperial expansion particularly when connected with the system of ‘oriental despotism’. The implication, given the detailed descriptions of Xerxes and the huge Persian army's defeat at the hands of a small number of Greeks, is that by the time of the Persian wars the rulers of the empire had lost their former rugged strength and had been seduced by the soft life offered them by the countries they had defeated: the conquerors had been taken captive by their victims and emasculated.

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Womack, Brantly. "Recognition, Deference, and Respect: Generalizing the Lessons of an Asymmetric Asian Order." Journal of American-East Asian Relations 16, no. 1-2 (2009): 105–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187656109793645698.

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AbstractAs many distinguished academics and officials have pointed out, the current rise of China is not a completely new phenomenon, but rather the return of China to a position of regional centrality and world economic share that were considered normal less than two hundred years ago.1 This fact underlines the importance of history in putting the present into perspective, and at the same time, to the extent that all history is history of the present, it requires a reevaluation of the structure of China's traditional relationships. Hitherto, China's place in modern social science has been in an exotic corner, a failed oriental despotism. To be sure, traditional China did collapse, and today's China is a different China rising in a different world. We might assume that China is rising now precisely because of its differences from traditional China, that it is the last step toward the end of history rather than a resonance with the past. However, the convenience of such an assumption makes it suspect. If China is simply the latest avatar of Western modernity, then it requires of the West some readjustment, but not rethinking. However, the only certainty about China's rise is that it is a complex phenomenon, and the convenience of constructions such as China-as-Prussia or China-as-Meiji Japan derives from their preemption of open-ended study rather than from their insight into complexity. To the extent that China is China, both past and present require reconsideration.

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Nepomnin, Oleg E. "The Social Structure of Qing China. Part 1: State and Taxpaying Peasantry in the “Сlass-State” System." Oriental Courier, no. 2 (2022): 60. http://dx.doi.org/10.18254/s268684310021472-7.

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The article follows up on the series of general theoretical works by Oleg E. Nepomnin (1935-2020) published in previous issues of the Oriental Courier. [Непомнин, 2019, 2020, 2021a, 2021b]. Oleg E. Nepomnin, a specialist in Chinese studies and Orientalism, was one of the most prominent theorists of Oriental societies. The author adheres to the concept of “class-state” which was formed in traditional China and determined all spheres of Chinese society, and in the Qing era. Society was built on an integral combination of grassroots or “small” “universal” collectivity: the Great Empire, the state. Such a system was characterized by the weakness of horizontal ties of class, class, social stratum, stratum, with the dominance of vertical ties. Its basis was the “primary unit — supreme power” link. The absorption of everyone in traditional China by the “personal” micro-community and the cellularity of society led to the underdevelopment and internal fragmentation of estates and social groups in the face of the all-powerful state of the eastern despotism. In medieval China the “class-state” was a major economic phenomenon. It was large-scale both in terms of the impact of officialdom on the economic life of the country and in a narrower sense. “Class-state” had its own sub-sector of public land tenure. In addition to this, the bureaucracy’s immediate sphere of domination included a second huge subsector — the tax-paying peasant lands. In the North and Manchuria, the economic system was predominantly “state” with the increased role of taxes and officials, while in the South and Central China it was predominantly private and “rental” with the special role of land rent and debt bondage. The “class-state” by means of the bureaucracy and the shenshi class ensured the integrity and unity of both regions. The “class-state” received annually in the form of taxes, duties and other taxation 40 % of the entire mass of real and “conditional” grain withdrawn from the village — over 13 % of China’s total production. About 52 % of this amount was rent-taxes on the taxed peasants, more than 38 % were levied on the private rented sector, and more than 9 % — on the government-dependent farmers.

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Penwill, J. L. "Quintilian, Statius and the Lost Epic of Domitian." Ramus 29, no. 1 (2000): 60–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00001697.

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‘sophos’ uniuersi clamamus et sublatis manibus ad cameram iuramus Hipparchum Aratumque comparandos illi homines non fuisse…(‘Fantastic!’ we all cry, and raising our hands to the ceiling we swear that not even Hipparchus and Aratus could have been put on a par with him.)Petronius SatyriconThis then is the visible work of Menard, in chronological order….I turn now to his other work: the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless.Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’The Flavians needed a poet. When Octavian established the Julio-Claudian dynasty he had in his hands a usefully exploitable victory over the forces of chaos and oriental despotism, a spin on Actium and its aftermath that was given full epic representation in the Aeneid's description of Aeneas' shield (Aen. 8.671-713); Antony was compromised by Cleopatra and years of propaganda, and it all took place far enough away for the final act in what everyone knew was a civil war to be portrayed as defeat of a foreign power and celebrated as such in the traditional manner (Caesar triplici inuectus Rotnana triumpholmoenia…, ‘Caesar, borne within the walls of Rome in triple triumph’, Aen. 8.714f.). By contrast the Flavian ascendancy was achieved through assault on these selfsame walls, and involved the desecration and burning of the Capitol (Tac. Hist. 3.69-74, who remarks id facinus post conditam urbem luctuosissimum foedissimumque rei publicae populi Romani accidit, ‘this was the most deplorable and outrageous crime to befall the republic of the Roman people since the foundation of the city’).

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Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. "MEHRZAD BOROUJERDI, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996). Pp 256." International Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no. 4 (November 2000): 565–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743800002853.

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Mehrzad Boroujerdi's Iranian Intellectuals and the West explores the works of three generations of Iranian writers and academics who contributed to the formation of a counter-Western “nativist” discourse. It opens with an exposition of the concepts that constitute the theoretical grid of the book and provide the title of its first chapter. “Otherness, Orientalism, Orientalism in Reverse, and Nativism.” Informed by contemporary critical theories, Boroujerdi argues for the centrality of the “other” to the formation of modern self-identity. Re-encapsulating the main theses of Said's Orientalism, he recounts that “the Islamic world came to be perceived as the embodiment of all that was recently left behind in Europe: an all-encompassing religion, political despotism, cultural stagnation, scientific ignorance, superstition, and so on” (p. 7). He then explains “Orientalism in reverse,” a concept formulated by the Syrian critic Sadik al-Azm. Preferring this clumsy concept to “Occidentalism” or “self-Orientalizing,” Boroujerdi defines Orientalism in reverse as “a discourse used by ‘oriental’ intellectuals and political elites to lay claim to, recapture, and finally impropriate their ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ identity” (pp. 11–12). As a counter-narrative of Orientalism, this discourse “uncritically embraces orientalism's assumption of a fundamental ontological difference separating the natures, peoples, and cultures of the Orient and the Occident” (p. 12). Boroujerdi attributes the popularity of Orientalism in reverse to the “seductive lure of nativism,” which is defined as “the doctrine that calls for the resurgence, reinstatement, or continuance of native or indigenous cultural customs, beliefs, and values” (p. 14). Surprisingly enough, Boroujerdi does not divulge that this seductive and pervasive “ nativism” has no discursively significant equivalent in Iranian cultural politics.

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Siber, Mouloud, and Bouteldja Riche. "Native Mis/rule and 'oriental Despotism' in Alexandre Dumas's Adventures in Algeria (1846) and Rudyard Kipling's from Sea to Sea, Letters of Travel (1889)." Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature 1, no. 2 (August 18, 2014): 71. http://dx.doi.org/10.15590/ajhal/2014/v1i2/54047.

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Dallmayr, Fred. "Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India. By Michael Curtis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 392p. $85.00 cloth, $22.99 paper." Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2 (June 2010): 654–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s153759271000071x.

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Thomson, Ann. "Michael Curtis . Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India . New York : Cambridge University Press . 2009 . Pp. ix, 382. Cloth $85.00, paper $22.99." American Historical Review 115, no. 4 (October 2010): 1212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.4.1212.

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Berchet, Jean-Claude. "Chateaubriand et le despotisme oriental." Dix-huitième Siècle 26, no. 1 (1994): 391–421. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/dhs.1994.1998.

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Ziring, Lawrence. "UNDER WESTERN EYES - Michael Curtis: Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. ix, 382. $85.00, $22.99, paper.)." Review of Politics 72, no. 2 (2010): 370–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0034670510000203.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Oriental despotism'

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