<i>1368: China and the Making of the Modern World</i> by Ali Humayun Akhtar

This book is ambitious but baffling. Akhtar seeks to rewrite the history of the world of the past half-millennium by placing what he calls the “East,” though he mostly means China, at the center of the narrative. Although not an ostensibly unorthodox approach, his contribution to it is to draw from sources in the Muslim world. What is baffling is that he has selected the year 1368 as the peg on which to hang the portrait without offering any analysis, or even description, of what happened in that year and why it might matter. He has chosen 1368 because it was the year in which the father of Emperor Yongle, who sent the much-discussed maritime expeditions of the early 1400s into the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, established his dynasty. These expeditions have inspired a great deal of nonsense derivative of the model of Columbian development (sail the seas, discover new places, and build a monopolistic trade network that scours wealth from elsewhere and transfers it home). Understandably, popular writers since the 1990s have lavished admiration on Zheng He, the household slave whom Emperor Yongle charged with leading these expeditions. The old Eurocentric narrative needed to be displaced, and the Chinese version of the Columbus fetish was available to displace it. Substituting one narrative of conquest with another, however, begs the question of why we should be cheering for global domination.Akhtar could have avoided wandering into this conundrum by analyzing what happened in the year that the Zhu family dynasty, which he sloppily calls the Great Ming, came to power. The simple tale that he tells, which is fundamental to contemporary Chinese state ideology, is that the Ming dynasty replaced the Yuan. But Zhu Yuanzhang’s military victory in 1368 did not merely switch one dynasty for another. The Ming founder ended the century-long Mongol military occupation, driving the Yuan Great State out of China, but then he installed a regime that perpetuated the Mongol political model of the Great State (yeke ulus in Mongolian), the effects of which can be traced today. Emperor Yongle’s expeditions into the maritime world were part of a diplomatic initiative to replace Chinggis Khan’s descendants as heaven’s overlords and require the rulers of the world to submit to the Chinese throne. Replacing the rise and fall of Eurocentrism with the fall and rise of Sinocentrism may dislodge a few prejudices, but unless we ask some tough questions, it runs the danger of positing imperial hegemony as the version of history that we are supposed to like.

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