Principal speaker
Associate Professor Andrew Phillips
This presentation re-evaluates the 'rise of the West' by considering the British Raj alongside two of its most important Asian predecessors and counterparts - Mughal India and Qing China. Historical sociologists have long sought the origins of the West's global ascendancy in attributes supposedly unique to the post Reformation West, be it military-technological supremacy, or variants of institutional or ideological exceptionalism. By contrast, this paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the Western supremacy by stressing the powerful similarities it bore with Asian empire-building projects from the late sixteenth century onwards. Far from being exceptional, Western imperialists faced the same challenges that the Mughals and the Manchus had earlier confronted in conquering and ruling culturally diverse indigenous populations that vastly outnumbered them. The strategies Westerners employed - to build multi-ethnic conquest coalitions, to bind them to the imperial centre, and to pre-emptively break apart potential balancing coalitions - moreover bore profound resemblances to those employed by their Asian counterparts. Western imperialism in Asia succeeded more through imitation of local precedents and practices than through endogenous innovation. Acknowledging this reality is essential, not only to unsettle conventional binaries of 'East' and 'West', but also to provide a better understanding the decisive importance that the 'Asian' imperial model played in making the modern world.
Andrew Phillips is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. He is the author of War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International Orders and (with J.C. Sharman) International Order in Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean. His research focuses on Great Power rivalry (especially in East and South Asia), religiously motivated terrorism, and the transformation of international orders from 1500CE-present. He is most recently the author of From Hollywood to Bollywood? Recasting Australia's Indo/Pacific Strategic Geography (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2016).
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RSVP on or before Monday 14 August 2017 , by email gai@griffith.edu.au , or by phone x54705