Finally finished Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. I’ll have a review up at my main blog, though I’m still wondering what the best tack for surveying a 900 page survey is. But there is one point of major relevance to this weblog: the idea of a “charter polity.”
To explain a charter polity, here are some examples:
– The West Frankish kingdom of the early Capetians
– England under Alfred the Great
– Han dynasty China
– Imperial Japan before the rise of the shogunate
These are the charter polities for France, England, China, and Japan, respectively. The charter polity looms large in the empire of the mind, with some substantive basis. In other words, the modern French nation may sometimes point to a Roman or Gaulish precedent, but its real earliest distinctive genealogical precursors can probably be traced back to the late first millennium, after the collapse of the pan-Frankish domains of the Carolingians. This doesn’t mean that the charter polity sets the dominant outline of a modern state. Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon kingdom serves as more of a spiritual and symbolic anchor to the modern English nation. Rather, it is probably arguable that Plantagenet England after the loss of the French territories is the most precise hinge of history in terms of the ethnognesis of the English nation.
What does this have with brown? Victor Lieberman argues that South Asia has two charter polities, whose successors are somewhat coterminous in space. The first is the Gupta Empire, from which Hindu civilization as we understand it today issued. The second is the Delhi Sultanate, which served as the template for Indo-Islamic civilization. This is an interesting insight for me, because in some ways this breaks out of a “linear” model, where what was a Dharmic civilization synthesizes with an Islamic one. Lieberman argues that for much of the history of India elite Indo-Islam was in India, but not of India. Though there was some synthesis, it was halting, imperfect, and unfinished.
Recall that charter polities need not be substantive determinative in the shape of a nation. They’re symbolic anchors. The power of Dharmic civilization in Indonesia, and Central and East Java in particular, is such that despite the Islamic nature of most Indonesians their charter polity is a Hindu one, Majapahit. Majapahit is the justification for the Indonesian state’s current expansive borders, because it claimed hegemony over the whole archipelago (as a matter of fact, this was a loose, and sometimes unacknowledged, suzerainty). This is one reason I think that Indonesians can’t “Otherize” the Hindu Balinese. The Balinese in many ways are more loyal to the cultural patrimony of the nation’s charter polity than other Indonesians, in particular non-Javanese who were only lightly impacted by Dharmic civilization.