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Nations Out of Empires
Also by Harry G. Gelber

AUSTRALIA, BRITAIN AND THE EEC, 1961–1963

NATIONAL POWER, SECURITY AND ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY
NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND CHINESE POLICY
PROBLEMS OF AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE (editor)
SOVEREIGNTY THROUGH INTERDEPENDENCE
TECHNOLOGY, DEFENSE AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS IN CHINA, 1975–1978
THE AUSTRALIAN–AMERICAN ALLIANCE
THE COMING OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
THE ROLE AND FUNCTION OF UNIVERSITIES
THE STRATEGIC BALANCE (editor)
Nations Out of Empires
European Nationalism and
the Transformation of Asia

Harry G. Gelber
Visiting Research Fellow
Asia Research Centre
London School of Economics and Political Science
© Harry G. Gelber 2001
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-0-333-92149-4
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London W1P 0LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified
as the author of this work in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2001 by
PALGRAVE
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of
St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and
Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd).
ISBN 978-1-349-42484-9 ISBN 978-0-230-28864-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9780230288645
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and
made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gelber, Harry Gregor.
Nations out of empires : European nationalism and
the transformation of Asia / Harry G. Gelber.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Asia—History. 2. Nationalism—Europe—History.
3. Nationalism—Asia—History. 4. Europe—History–
–1492– 5. Asia—Relations—Europe. 6. Europe—Relations–
–Asia. I. Title.
DS33.7 .G45 2001
303.48’2504—dc21
00–069470

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
 This is for
Alexander, Charlotte, Sebastian,
James, Henrietta and Rebecca
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1 The Asian Order 6

2 Explorers, Soldiers, Priests and Traders 19

3 Nationalism and Revolution in Europe 53

4 From Trade to Empire 89

5 Imperial Apotheosis 113

6 Imitation and Rejection 150

7 Decolonization as Aftermath 193

8 Concluding Ironies 212

Notes and References 225

Bibliography 243

Index 253

vii
This page intentionally left blank
Preface

The story of European colonialism in Asia is nothing if not a well-

ploughed field. If I have ventured to try my hand, it is in the hope that
there may still be room for a general perspective, and one which
emphasizes the role of European nationalist ideas and construction in
the story of both colonies and metropoles. It is not, however, a per-
spective which tries to cover all of the colonial efforts of Europe or the
West: that seemed to me too large a canvas, too complex a story to be
dealt with in a single volume except at a level of generality verging on
the banal. Nor does it deal with all of Europe’s colonial powers, or with
all parts of Asia. Instead, this book confines itself to a tale, and a thesis,
that concentrates on Britain, France and the Netherlands in Europe,
and on India, Vietnam, Indonesia, China and Japan in Asia. Nor could
it claim to be based on fresh research in primary sources. It relies,
instead, on the rich store of secondary material. Beyond that, this book
flows from my general interest in nationalism, not merely as a set –
perhaps kaleidoscope – of ideas but as a pattern for socio-political
construction.

Like anyone working in such a field, I owe much to many people. First
and foremost, to the London School of Economics, which has once
again offered me the academic hospitality without which the work
would not have been possible. In the School, my primary debts are to
the Asia Research Centre, to the chairman of its Research Committee,
Professor Lord Desai, and to its director, Professor Michael Leifer, both
of whom have saved me from a number of errors. I have also had
invaluable advice and help from Professors Christopher Andrew and
David Fromkin, Mr Christopher Gelber and Professors Fred Halliday,
Christopher Hill, Donald Horowitz, James Mayall, Tony Milner, Robert
O’Neill, Sir Robert Wade-Gery, Professor Wang Gungwu and Donald
Cameron Watt. At Palgrave, Ms Josie Dixon and her colleagues have
been helpfulness itself. It is surely unnecessary to add that any errors of
omission or commission that remain are mine alone.
HARRY G. GELBER

ix
Introduction

The story of European colonialism occupies a deceptively neat period

of modern history. It begins with the first Portuguese voyages into the
Indian Ocean at the start of the sixteenth century, and ends with the
breakup of the British, French, Dutch and other empires (including the
Soviet one) five centuries later, during the twentieth. That neat frame-
work is, however, debatable. There were Western Christian colonies in
the Holy Land, and Portuguese and Italian voyages to Africa, long
before Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope. And five
hundred years later, a globalizing international scene is in many ways
dominated by political and financial institutions in which, former
colonies sometimes complain, they are the objects and the former
colonialists the subjects. Nevertheless, European and, more broadly,
Western colonialism looks like a reasonably closed historical epoch
and it is possible to discuss not only its details but the larger trends
which made it an important and fascinating phenomenon.
There was, of course, no single cause for the long centuries of
Western expansion. Much European exploration stemmed from simple
curiosity or adventurism. In its early stages, Europeans wanted to find
out what was there; whether there really was an edge to the world, so
that if you went too far you would fall off. There were resource pres-
sures, not to mention simple greed, which encouraged the search for
wealth and, as part of that, profitable and secure trade. There was the
simple lust for war and conquest among Europeans accustomed to
conflict. In addition, the states of Europe sought security, whether in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries against Islam or, in the nine-
teenth, against each other in the scramble for Africa. Not least, there
was the desire for settlement: Siberia was occupied for just this reason,
and the United States is the child of English, Scots, Irish and German

1
H.G. Gelber, Nations Out of Empires
© Harry G. Gelber 2001
2 Nations Out of Empires

settlers’ as are Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The same is true of
the Spaniards who settled in Latin America or the French who made
their homes in North Africa and parts of the Pacific.
Of particular interest are the great maritime empires created by
Western Europe, especially those of the British, French and Dutch in
East, South and Southeast Asia. They are quite distinct from the land-
based empires of the Ottomans, the Russians, or the Austro-Hungarians
and passed, in general terms, through five stages. The first lasted from
the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. In this, with the
exception of Spain, the Europeans deferred to local empires, and inter-
course with local societies was between cultural (though not religious)
equals. The European presence in the East Indies – ‘East of Suez’? – was
almost entirely commercial, confined to tiny coastal settlements where
soldiers and traders huddled together under the guns of Western war-
ships, but in truth were dependent on the goodwill of their hosts. For
the major empires of India and China, or Japan’s Tokugawa shoguns,
they were politically and strategically quite marginal.
By the early eighteenth century a second stage opened. The political
and military organization, technologies and skills developed in Europe
– partly as a result of an endless series of wars – started to make pene-
tration into the Asian interior possible. Native authorities could now
be dealt with from a position of some superiority. The Europeans
found they could defeat larger – in some cases very much larger –
native armies and dictate advantageous and even exploitative treaties
to local rulers. It was the start of a kind of hegemony, but without
direct control. European positions depended on the ability to overawe
or manipulate local elites and rulers.
The situation was promoted by revolutionary changes in Europe.
Starting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the development
of nationalism, especially in Britain and France but also in Holland,
Spain and Russia, played a decisive role in the evolution of Europe’s
states, and therefore also in their colonial expansion. This was much
more than the ideas about ethnic and religious separateness by which
men have always identified themselves. It was not confined to philoso-
phies, or even political or cultural or ethnic passions. It combined
several elements whose conjunction not merely fuelled the growth of
Europe’s empires but provided much of the driving force of modern
national and international history. One was a set of political ideas
which implied an historically novel basis for political and state legit-
imacy and therefore action. Here was a changed conception, brought
about by the three great Western revolutions which span the
 Introduction 3

eighteenth century, of the very sources of legitimate political sover-

eignty. Ever since, the nation-state has meant a sovereign community
not only self-consciously separate in history, language, culture and,
almost always, ethnicity, but one whose internal loyalties, cohesion
and capacity for common action are actively promoted. That has also
brought the development of novel systems of social organization,
including the administrative expansion and centralization of the state
and the promotion of a common language and educational system.
Without these conjunctions, nationalism could not have triumphed
within Europe. But once it did, it produced social energies and efficien-
cies which helped to energize not only Europe’s own wars but its over-
seas expansion.
One would not expect such changes to occur quickly or easily; and
their precise combination and timing naturally varied a good deal,
both between the Europeans themselves and in their impact on other
societies which they influenced or dominated. In Britain and France
the establishment of national and secular political principles, and the
forms of social organization those principles made possible, took at
least a century to develop. As they did, they also helped to fuel the
industrial revolution and the financial networks which accompanied it.
They provided much of the impetus for the change from merely com-
mercial activities to the expanding imperial state. And they under-
pinned the belief in Europe’s ‘right to rule’.
These developments overlapped with the third stage, roughly from
the end of the eighteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth.
It saw the advance of direct European rule, and was made possible by
much more than the new ideas and social structures. It depended
heavily on the industrialization of Europe and North America and on
their rapid technological advances. And the technical advances rested
on the scientific rationalism of the previous two centuries, not on
national principles. Yet their exploitation depended heavily on the
financial, administrative and especially industrial developments which
the new state structures encouraged. So, now, steamships could bring
very large numbers of people to the colonies and help to explore river
systems. Railways opened up continents and made mass transport of
people and goods possible. Medical science opened up still more land,
as it overcame scourges like yellow fever and malaria. Breech-loading
and later quick-firing guns confirmed the West’s military superiority.
The result was a degree of European (and, for that matter, American)
dominance which seemed entirely beyond challenge. It was accepted
by almost all the colonial peoples, as proof of the superiority not just
4 Nations Out of Empires

of the technology and prowess but of the culture of the colonial power.
The white man, whether in law, in administration or on the battlefield,
had demonstrated his natural superiority and therefore clearly had a
right to rule. Nor was it by any means simply a matter of oppression.
European law and government brought hitherto unknown security,
stability, health and, at times, education.
A fourth stage in the colonial story came towards the end of the
nineteenth century. It had two parallel elements. One was the debate
within Europe itself about the moral justification of empire, beyond
simple assertions of imperial pride or even of strategic need. That
began a dispute between liberal imperialists, who justified and cele-
brated empire as bringing civilization to the dark corners of the earth,
and liberal humanists, for whom empire violated the very principles of
liberty, equality or social justice which Western societies claimed as
their own. Together with that came other critiques, whether from
socialists implacably opposed to the bourgeois state and all its works,
or Christian groups emphasizing the brotherhood of man or the new
trade unions that saw empires as costly in money and men.
At the same time came politically effective nationalist assertions in
the Asian colonies themselves, moving through three broad phases.
First came attempts at conservative revival. This was followed by a
search for assimilation and co-optation in governance. Only then came
the forced development, whether in India or Vietnam or Japan, of
socio-economic developments which recognizably followed European
examples. It was rising local assertion in modern nationalist forms, by
groups or parties organized along national rather than regional or
sectional lines, which could then express demands for political
independence.
A fifth, relatively brief, stage came in the two or three decades
ending around the 1960s. It saw the collapse of Western empires in the
Asian-Pacific area, whether for reasons of political principle, psycholog-
ical exhaustion and economic weakness in the colonial metropoles or
the growing power of nationalist assertion in the colonies themselves.

In dealing with so large a field, the account offered in this book is

limited in various ways. It is not an account of Asian modernization.
Modernization is, in any case, a question-begging concept, since it can
only mean movement in the direction of the modern, i.e. contem-
porary and ‘advanced’, world. It is not easy to see what social factors,
whether domestic or international, can be excluded from that.
 Introduction 5

Nor does it try to deal with the entire colonial experience. It is

confined to some aspects of the British, French and Dutch efforts at
colonization in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, China and Japan. It focuses
strongly on the particular importance of European-style nationalism
and the growth of the nation-state, and its role in the story of coloniz-
ation and decolonization and the changing role of the individual from
subject to citizen; since the subject of a monarchy has different rights
and functions from those of ‘citizenship [which] is by definition
national’.1
The book also assumes that somewhat different interpretations
might apply in, say, Latin America or Africa, or in dealing with the
latter-day empires of the United States or Japan. It is therefore not a
comprehensive account of Europe’s total influence on Asia, still less of
the important and sometimes subtle ways in which Asia has influenced
Europe. It underlines Europe’s political, military and administrative
genius, which is a different thing from virtue. And it tackles the story
in a conventionally chronological way, which can easily confuse
sequence with cause and give excessive importance to events which
can be dated.
One other word of caution. No attempt to highlight one theme can
do full justice to the confusing, contradictory and invariably messy
empirical detail. Nor can nationalism, or the development of the
nation-state, be usefully seen as a separate or even clearly delineated
phenomena. Emphasis on them may, nevertheless, be heuristically
useful and offer revised avenues of interpretation.
1
The Asian Order

The Asian-Pacific region is vast and immensely varied in geography,

topography and climate. The Pacific Ocean alone covers a third of the
earth’s surface and is twice as large as its nearest rival, the Atlantic.
On its shores lie the steamy islands of Southeast Asia, the mountains
of Japan, and in China harsh northern plains as well as the hot, rainy
regions of the south which are the region’s best agricultural land. It
was in these fertile valleys, capable of producing rice, that early
populations grew. By AD 1 around 53 million people lived in China,
or 86 per cent of all the peoples bordering the Pacific. At about the
same time, settlers from Korea and China introduced Japan to wet
rice cultivation. Major population increases in the region only began
around the eleventh or twelfth centuries, with the spread of rice
strains yielding two harvests a year. By the thirteenth century the
population had reached 100 million and went on growing. By the
end of the fifteenth century China alone probably had 100 million
people and two hundred years later India had also passed the
100 million mark. The standard diet was vegetarian: almost 98 per cent
of calories consumed came from vegetables, very little from meat or
fish. Raising cattle for meat is a waste, since they consume more
calories than they yield as food.

If geography and climate are varied, so are peoples and civilizations.

For a thousand years before the arrival of the Europeans, they were
shaped by contrasting trends. There was a constant movement of war
and conquest, and an often lively network of communication and
commerce. The Asian order was not only large, but sophisticated and
interdependent in trade and ideas, coupled with much underlying
stability in the major cultures and religions.

6
H.G. Gelber, Nations Out of Empires
© Harry G. Gelber 2001
 The Asian Order 7

The states and empires of South and East Asia were constantly threat-
ened by tribal raiders from their north, often driven by population
pressures on the steppes. China, especially, went through repeated
periods of this kind of insecurity. India was similarly threatened. But
Turks, Turcomans, Mongols and Kirghiz were no mere scourges. In the
three centuries before AD 1500, they dominated the entire known
world with the exception of Western and Central Europe. Turkish and
Mongol rulers governed India, China, Persia, Egypt, North Africa,
Mesopotamia, the Balkans, Russia and the Hungarian plain.
The greatest of these rulers, whose very name is still a byword for
terror, was Genghis Khan. Cruelty may have been part of his genius,
but he was a great captain; brave, tenacious, shrewd, patient. He also
encouraged able administrators, adopted a code of law and practised
religious toleration – if only for the political purpose of ruling many
different peoples – and was learned in the arts and traditions of China.
He created and ruled what may well be the greatest empire the world
has ever seen. Earlier wars against the Hunnish empire of Kin had
given the Mongols excellent military training, even in the arts of Kin’s
Chinese allies. But it was Genghis who organized the Mongol tribes
and began to create a military state in which every male between the
ages of fifteen and seventy served as a soldier, thus producing great
armies, largely of mounted archers and bound by iron discipline.
Mongol commanders planned meticulously, paid close attention to
logistics and supply; their strategy, tactics and, not least, political and
tactical intelligence were almost always vastly superior to those of their
opponents. In a series of remarkable campaigns Genghis launched
these armies westwards against Central Asia as well as southwards,
against China. He attacked there in 1211 and by the early 1220s held
most of China’s north. Further west he took major cities like Bokhara
and Samarkand. By the time he died in 1227, Genghis ruled the lands
from the coast of the Pacific to the Black Sea, and from the forests of
Siberia to the Persian Gulf.
After his death the empire grew further. A mere fourteen years later,
the Mongols had moved further westwards. They overran Poland and
seized the Hungarian plain. They plundered India’s northwest, includ-
ing the Punjab, though they did not establish governance there. Other
Mongol armies invaded Persia and Syria. They captured Baghdad in
1258 and crushed the Abbasid caliphate which had dominated
Mesopotamia for five centuries. 1 They moved further into China too,
occupying all of north China by 1234 and, after more conquests by
Ghengis’s grandson Kublai, the Sung empire in the south as well. In
8 Nations Out of Empires

the meantime, other Mongol armies had reached Tonkin and Annam
in what is now Vietnam. The Mongols even attempted, around 1280,
to invade Japan, which was only saved when a kamikaze2 storm
destroyed Kublai Khan’s navy. At its greatest extent, the empire ran
from the mouth of the Amur river to Hungary and from Siberia to
north India, Burma and even Java.
In all these campaigns the ruthlessness of the Mongols – and of their
successors – became proverbial. Echoes of the Mongol terror persist to
this day, as in the word ‘Tartar’. Ghengis and his successors regularly
adopted a policy of terror and selective massacre. They sacked Bokhara.
Herat was destroyed, leaving a million dead. A series of Russian towns
were destroyed and their inhabitants massacred. Kiev was left without
a single inhabitant, the surrounding steppe strewn with skulls. The
terror continued, even when Tamerlane captured Delhi in 1398. Each
of these conquests was a catastrophe. From Korea to Hungary, van-
quished armies were simply obliterated. In whole regions the Mongols
were apt to leave peasants in their fields, to sow and raise crops, only
to slaughter them afterwards anyway. Millions were killed and many
more enslaved.
The Mongol empire quickly became too large and varied to be gov-
erned from one tent-city. So Persia, Central Asia, China and Russia
came to be dominated by different branches of the ruling family. But
family unity gave way to competition and some Mongols ‘went native’.
The wealth and culture of China, especially, undermined Mongol
cohesion and military enthusiasm. Their rulers took the Chinese name
Yuan and retained Chinese institutions, including the civil service and
tax system. That encouraged a Chinese reaction against the Mongols
and brought the properly Chinese Ming dynasty to power. It governed
from 1368 and expanded Chinese power, for example over Korea and
into Annam.
The political patterns of early modern Asia developed from the disin-
tegration of this Mongol empire, beginning with the death of Kublai
Khan in 1294. The empire quickly broke into three major and several
minor fragments. The three were the Chinese empire, a Persian one
and the rule of the Kipchaks in Russia. But matters were complicated
by the spread of Islam. Islamic hegemony had by then passed from its
original Arab base to the Persians, and from there to the Ottoman
Turks. The Ottomans had risen to dominance in the Islamic world
even before the Mongol conquests and now, roughly from 1300 to
1500, Islamic expansion resumed under their leadership. They moved
into India as well as the Balkans, defeating the Slav forces at Kosovo in
 The Asian Order 9

1389.3 They went on to destroy the remnants of the Eastern Orthodox

Byzantine empire and, in one of the major landmarks of European
history, to occupy Constantinople in 1453. Seventy years later, under
Suleiman the Magnificent, they reached the gates of Vienna.
By the fifteenth century, then, the Asian coastal scene was dom-
inated by four great empires. In the west were the Ottomans, whose
empire stretched from the Danube to the Red Sea. Further east lay the
Safavids of Persia; but they lacked the kind of bureaucracy, and system
of military service, which underpinned Turkish power. Further east
again, and the pivot of Asia’s seaborne trade, was India, soon to be
dominated by the Mogul empire. It was Indian Hindus who had also
colonized Southeast Asia. Finally, eastwards from India, and dominat-
ing the East Asian coastline, lay the majestic bulk of China.
These empires and principalities were far from inward looking or
ignorant of the outside world. Japan had from ancient times been regu-
larly affected, and in some respects even formed, by influences from
Korea and especially China. Travellers – a cultural invasion of sorts –
reached Japan from far-away Indonesia. Indo-China was repeatedly
invaded. Before 1300 the Mongol court even sent an emissary to
Europe in a vain attempt to create an anti-Arab alliance. He was
Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian Christian and the first Chinese known to
have visited Europe. He was received by the Byzantine emperor, the
Pope and both Philip IV of France and Edward I of England. Franciscan
friars reached the Mongol court in 1245 and 1253 and reported back,
as did others a century later. But the most famous of the Western trav-
ellers was Marco Polo, whose journey appears to have lasted from 1271
to 1295, and who served for a time at the court of Kublai Khan. There
were other occasional contacts with Westerners including, much later,
Jesuit priests. Moreover, China regularly received tribute from sur-
rounding societies and tended to dominate parts of Southeast Asia.
From early days, too, there was a system of strategic and commercial
relations across oceans and deserts. Some Indian writings from 600 BC
suggest that even then there was trade with Java and Sumatra. The
Phoenicians traded from Cornwall to India. When Hannibal crossed
the Alps around 210 BC in his struggle with Rome, he had Indian
mahouts in charge of his elephants. By the twelfth century AD, Chinese
junks traded fairly regularly with Indonesia, India, even the Persian
Gulf. The Mongols launched huge naval expeditions; in 1274 and
again in 1281 they invaded Japan, the second time with 170 000 sol-
diers and 4 500 ships – almost as many vessels as the Anglo-American
navies deployed in the 1944 invasion of Normandy. In the early 1290s
10 Nations Out of Empires

they sent 1000 ships and 20 000 men on an unsuccessful expedition to

Java. By the fourteenth century Moslems controlled the carrying trade
in the Indian Ocean and Moslem clerics dominated seaports in Java,
Borneo and the Malay peninsula. Meanwhile Japanese pirates were
harrying the Chinese coast.
Long before 1500, then, there was a sophisticated and what would
now be called entirely multi-cultural network of merchants, sailors,
officials and cut-throats in ports and settlements from China to main-
land Southeast Asia, to Java, India, and to the coasts of Arabia and East
Africa. As early as the thirteenth century, the Mongol empire and its
pax tatarica gave relative security to travellers between the China coast
and the Black Sea, down to the Gulf and even into what was to become
Russia.4 Much of Asia was therefore opened to European merchants
and missionaries. Colonies of Italian merchants were established at
Constantinople and at Trebizond, the terminus of the ‘silk road’
leading either via Samarkand to China or else to Ormuz on the Gulf.
Indeed, Ormuz became a chief entrepot for the spice trade from the
Malay archipelago through India and Ceylon to the Middle East and
Europe; while Malacca became the main port for spice shipments from
the islands either east to China or westwards to India, whence Arab or
Persian traders brought them to Ormuz.
Combined with trade came a brief but brilliant period of Chinese
trans-oceanic assertion. Between 1405 and 1433 Chinese fleets, com-
manded by legendary admirals like Cheng Ho, sailed the seas to display
China’s power to the barbarians, to assert power, to receive tribute, to
collect information and to trade. 5 Cheng Ho made seven voyages to
Java, Ceylon and East Africa, and gave Chinese to places like Mombasa.
His fleets had up to 37 000 men and 300 or more ships. His treasure
ships were probably the largest ships ever seen up to then, each longer
than a modern football field and with advanced marine technologies.
They were multi-decked, with watertight bulkheads, bamboo fenders,
axial rudders and navigational compasses. Some were built for luxury,
but the fleet also had warships, and troop and horse transports. By
some estimates, between 1404 and 1407 the Chinese built, or refitted,
some 1680 ships.
Long before the wave of European exploration began, therefore,
Levantine merchants and Venice grew rich on the westward sectors of
this inter-continental trade. They concentrated on the sectors which
connected Italy with Alexandria and the regions beyond. But Genoese
and Venetian traders could also use the trans-Asian land routes made
safe by the ‘Pax tatarica’ to travel to China in search of silks. Chinese
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