Look to the East

Locating 'oriens' on a moving planet

Hello, welcome, or welcome back,

Once upon a time in Britain, reaching for a cup of coffee while engaging in intellectual pursuits (like thinking about history!), was the ultimate display of sophistication. Drinking coffee carried the same cachet as breakfasting today on a chia seed and almond milk overnight jar with a handful of goji berries and a swirl of agave syrup. Without foodie blogs, enthusiasts gathered together to share the experience of coffee IRL (as the kids probably don’t say: ‘in real life’ if it isn’t part of your acronym lexicon).

Coffee has been credited with a role in all sorts of things, including the rise of modern science, the birth of liberal democracy, and the industrial revolution. Coffee gave rise to coffee houses: places where people gathered to… drink coffee. Unlike inns or restaurants, there wasn’t the busyness of eating a meal to keep people occupied and, unlike a pub or alehouse, drinking coffee might make you jitter but it doesn’t slow down your thinking. People drank coffee. They talked about coffee. But they talked about other things too, like the rights of man, and woman, the best way to fit a cam shaft to transfer horizontal into vertical motion and the link between clean air and good health.

But why was coffee so damn trendy? It is pretty great. Several hundred years later, here I am writing to you with a coffee by my side and there you may be, reading this with a coffee steaming in your mug. Still, in 17th-century London, it is hard to explain the passion for coffee just on the grounds of a tingle in the tastebuds. Like chia seeds and almond milk and goji berries and agave syrup, coffee was hyper-fashionable in the places it had traditionally never been before. It was new, it was rare, at least to begin with.

Coffee also had a particular quality that had counted for a lot in Europe for millennia: it came from the Orient. Coffee houses often lent into this, with decor and decorations designed to evoke Ottoman palaces, or what London punters thought Ottoman palaces might look like. When in need of style, look to the East, had been a European rule of thumb for a long time.

This Viennese coffee house, with interior decoration dating from the 19th century, features vaulted ceilings, a wide columned space, elaborate carved capitals and decorative, lavish drapes - all things associated with ‘the East’ in the European imagination of recent centuries. The interior is almost designed to look a little bit like a mosque or an Eastern Mediterranean church.

The coins I study and have written about here and here, which were made in the Mediterranean but found in South India, are part of this story. In the late Roman period (the 4th-7th centuries CE in the case of my coins), merchants bought spices, fabric and incense from Arabia, East Africa and India and sold them to people all over the Mediterranean, who no doubt enjoyed the way these products felt and smelled and tasted but who also valued having access to these things from faraway, which were pretty common but not so everyday that using them wasn’t a statement.

Even earlier than that, in the 4th century BCE, Alexander III of Macedon had headed further and further East on his fantasy of world conquest, until his armies, faced with the reality of being thousands of miles from home on an endless campaign, finally told him that enough was enough. ‘Where Alexander was told, this far and no further’ was how ‘India’ was labelled on some medieval European maps of the world.

The exact date of the so-called Peutinger Table is much debated. It is a very long, thin map of Afro-Eurasia, marked mainly by Roman roads and there are good reasons for thinking that it is made from data or different prototype maps from the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th and possibly 12th centuries. For now, though, exactly when it dates from doesn’t make this detail any less interesting: on the edge of what was known in Europe as ‘India’, the mapmaker observed the limit of Alexander’s conquests.

The East, however, has significance in cultures far beyond Europe. Wherever you are on our shared sphere of spinning rock, it is the direction of the rising sun, associated with new beginnings, hope and renewal by societies across continents and centures.

Here the sunrise is seen behind the Tiruvannamalai Temple, just southwest of Chennai in Tamil Nadu. Many temples in India, like Christian churches across world, as well as stone circles and other monuments associated with prehistoric cultures on virtually every continent, have been built to align with the rising sun.

Where these millennia-old flows of human thought meet - the European idea of the Orient, which has its own distinctive features and implications, and the near-universal human fixaton on the East - has become more and more interesting to me over the years. (Of course, there are also other culturally specific ideas of ‘the East’, not just Europe’s. And even Europe’s is regionally varied, as we’ll see, but for now, let’s keep things as simple as millennial metaphysics allows...).

Straits Branch!

I’ve written before about a project that is sitting on the back burner of my historical stovetop: it is still bubbling away gently under the working title ‘Straits Branch!’

The idea, eventually, is to write a book about how learned societies developed in European colonies, especially in the 18th and 19th century. I am interested in how those socities shaped not just what we know about the world today but also how we know things and share that knowledge. Those learned societies, though, were themselves a kind of diaspora of coffee house culture. As European empires spread around the world, especially in Asia, coffee house culture followed, creating knots and networks of people obsessed with understanding the world and used to gathering together to talk about it. These are the people who will take centre stage in ‘Straits Branch!’, especially the people who weren’t in the exciting hubs of empire but who were out on the edges. They came wanting to understand, to control and also to meet and discuss their experiences and findings.

People who travelled with empire also came with certain ideas, laid broadly in the world around them, by the schools and universities they went to, the newspapers they read, the sermons they heard in church.

By the 18th century, most Europeans firmly believed that the Roman Empire had been a European Empire (even though most of its territory and its richest territory was in Africa and Asia). They often saw themselves as latter day Romans, building a new ‘civilising’ empire. They also believed, like the Romans, that from the East came luxury and riches, mostly in the form of those same consumables that the Romans had enjoyed - silk, frankincense, spices - and, more recnt revelations like tea and coffee.

These ideas were defined in the 1970s by Edward Said in the 1970s as a collective conception of the world. He called it ‘Orientalism’.¹ Said argued that Orientalism built up over time, from antiquity to the present, blending ideas of luxury and wealth but also effeminacy and decadence. The East, Said said, became ‘the Orient’, a strange amalgam of desire and revulsion in the European imagination. It was combined with a powerful will to dominate and a set of beliefs that helped with that, including that ‘the Orient’ had always been the same - it was a place that was always the same and so ‘needed’ outsiders to make things change. This idea, which still resonates today, is visible in all sorts of areas of 18th-20th-century life and empire.

Continuing the coffee house theme, this picture, painted in 1857 by John Frederick Lewis, depicts a serving girl bringing coffee in Ottoman-era Cairo. Lewis spent many years living in Cairo, so his vision of ‘the Orient’ was not fiction. His paintaings are particularly notable for their detailed depiction of architecture. Here, in the foreground, you can see a distinctive multi-coloured marble floor, made in a technique known as opus sectile, which was used widely across the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Even though his paintings included a lot of accurate details, though, they were also marketed to a European (mainly British) audience and presented a very particular view of the East. You can see here the focus on lavishness and wealth - the marble floor, the layered, rich robes and tended garden - and also on the idea of timelessness. Women dressed and depicted like this could also be found in paintings of Biblical scenes, with virtually identical dress.

Said’s theory of Orientalism has been expanded on and deepened by other scholars, working on particular cases that modify and support his points. There has also been critique, from the way that Said generalised about Europe the way that Orientalists generalised about ‘the East’, to the specific turning points that Said picked and overlooked in writing his story. But the concept of Orientalism has stayed the course because it expresses something important. Debating exactly how it works, when and where it has applied, and how, has proved useful because it helps us to understand the past better.

That was where ‘Straits Branch!’ came from as a project. Studying the ancient past in the Western Indian Ocean, I work constantly with writings by men (and very occasionally women), who were trying to figure out the history of places they were also trying to understand in the present. People could be imperial operatives, missionaries or adventurers trying to make a buck on import-export. Simultaneously, the could be fascinated by inscriptions, coins, archaeological sites or the customs, flora and fauna of the places those jobs took them to. When I eventually write it, ‘Straits Branch!’ will be a study of Orientalism in action. It will also be a chance to think about how learning about ‘the Orient’ changed what people thought about Europe.

That’s only an outline, though. The details are what make history real and make it matter. What motivated these particular people in these particular places? Generalisations are useful but we don’t live in the world as generalisations. How each of us adopts or resists the general flow of things around us: that is history. To write that story I will eventually need time. So last year I applied for some fellowships that would have given me time - several months studying in a research centre or library. Fellowships like this are the lifeblood of scholarship. The applications based on ‘Straits Branch!’ didn’t work and that is fine.

First of all, I got another fellowship for a different project that I’m actually more ready for right now. (You can read a bit about that here. It is taking me to Istanbul in September and I can’t wait!)

Second of all, ideas on the back burner can often benefit for the time they spend there - like a good, murky stew. While they bubble away, they absorb the flavours from the things you’re cooking on the front burner (to stretch this metaphor a bit). You find odd bits of ingredients while you’re looking for other things and chuck them in the pot. You take a quick taste now and again and mix things a bit differently based on what else you’ve been experimenting with. So I didn’t mind not getting those fellowships. Writing the applications for them was a chance to grub up some of those extra ingredients, take a taste and think about how the recipe might develop.

One question, for example, had hung around in the background of my '‘Straits Branch!’ stew, but I had assumed that it would be a short but necessary note in the introduction: where was ‘the Orient’ for the people I’m writing about?

It is a notoriously complicated question. People at the time did use the term but often they didn’t. They talked about Asia, the East, the Asiatic(k) lands and cultures, about specific states or regions, about language groups and cultures. What counts? There isn’t a single, simple answer. I’m a member of the Oriental Numismatic Society (a name change was mooted a few years ago, but was voted against by the membership). It brings together scholarship on the coinage of Asia, but also North Africa.

The ‘Orient’ overlaps with other messay cateogories, like ‘the Middle East’. Is everywhere in ‘the Middle East’ in ‘the Orient’? And where, indeed, is in the Middle East? To the Romans and for centuries aftwards, large parts of East Africa, including modern Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti would have been ‘Oriental’. Now they might not be. People I study for ‘Straits Branch!’ were equally aware of these messay terms. The Royal Asiatick Society in Bengal, founded in 18th century, was called that exactly because some of its founders argued against Oriental - what did it even mean, they asked?!

And studying the Orient ends up revealing how complicated its opposed terms are, too. Where does ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’ begin or end? The truth is that the two cannot be defined in isolation. That was the big insight that Said put his finger on in Orientalism. There has historically been a collection of attitudes, ideas, assumptions, overlapping ignorances and understandings, that did (and do) make people see some places as ‘a bit like each other’ or ‘a bit different’. ‘The Orient’, like ‘the West’ was a way of marking out ‘us’ and ‘them’, especially where imperial power was at stake, rather than about creating cast iron defintions.

European historical generalisations about Islam, for example, were a core element of what Said identified as Orientalism. Europeans from the 18th century often talked about Islam as a religion, a culture and a political force, that exemplified ‘the Orient’. Islam, they argued, in scholarship, the press and diplomatic circles, was exotic, immersed in luxury and riches (those Ottoman-style coffee houses!) but also decadent and corrupt - the essence of ‘the Orient’. Thus, it made sense, for people who thought that way, that anywhere where there was Islam was also ‘the Orient’. But this was never really about an understanding of Islam. Instead, it was a recycling of much older ideas about Islam that contrasted it with Christianity (‘them’ and ‘us’ for these scholars), so whatever Islam was imagined to be, Christianity (and therefore ‘the West’) was usually iamgined to be the opposite: frugal, honest, capable of change (or progress).

(For what it is worth, these generalisations have never been universal. There were, and are, other people arguing that talking about Islam as a single thing is about as useful as suggesting ‘the Christian world’ is all the same, from 1990s New York to Nicaea in the 330s. Still, understanding stereotypes is vital for understanding the world, because lots of people act as if they are true and even rejecting them is shaped by pushing back against the prevailing opinion.)

Anyway, I was planning to grapple with all of this, set my terms and then dive into my case studies. I knew that ‘where’ was a complicated question but it wasn’t really my question.

A view from the North

Then I began writing an application to spend a year working on this project in Helsinki. Mainly, it would have been great to have had time to dedicate to it and access to some brilliant libraries. It would also have provided an opportunity to take a different look at the project, to make the most of things I could only access in Helsinki. I started by finding out what was in those great libraries - not just the published books but the old papers and records. Then I looked at who is based in Helsinki now and has been in the past, working on ‘Oriental’ topics, by their definition or anybody else’s.

And reading about Oriental studies in Finland was when things took a turn I hadn’t expected. It was a meeting point of specific and global ideas - the European idea of the the Orient and the more literal concept of the East. And where, pray tell, is to the East if you are in Finland? That’s right: not really South Asia or North Africa. East Asia is to the East for sure, but it is a very, very long way and there weren’t many (any!) Finnish colonies in Korea or Japan. (Though there is a long and illustrious history of Chinese-language studies at Helsinki.) Mainly, if you draw a line (south)eastwards from Finland you get to… Russia. And, if you look at the history of scholars in Finland who defined themselves as doing ‘Oriental studies’ around the same time as my ‘Straits Branch!’ protagonists, many of them were studying places in the Russian Empire.

The dynamics for these scholars, though, were very different. My main actors, British men living and working in South and Southeast Asia, were, broadly ‘in charge’, or at least linked to a government that was increasingly establishing itself in a dominant position. Finland was a colonised not a colonising territory, with Russia as one of its intermittent and serious threats. In this respect, the Finnish position was completely opposite to that of my ‘Straits Branch!’ crowd.

And yet, many themes of a broader European Orientalism are also visible. Early Finnish Orientalists didn’t usually study Russia itself - the dominant culture that controlled the empire to Finland’s East. They didn’t study Moscow. They studied smaller culture groups within or close to Russia, especially in the Atlas and Caucasus Mountains. The impression I got is that, wherever exactly it was located, ‘the Orient’ needed to be somewhere just a little bit mysterious, perhaps marginal, at least in the cultural wolrdview of the scholar. It needed to be a place perceived as steeped in ‘ancient customs’ and strange superstitions, a place a bit divorced from the modern world. And although the power dynamics of Finnish scholars in relation to their Orient were different, they, like my ‘Straits Branch!’ scholars, were often conscious of working on the edges of where the action was, whether that was London, Paris, Moscow or Kolkata.

Letting it simmer

One of the main reasons I probably didn’t get that fellowship, or any of the others I pitched ‘Straits Branch!’ to is that I got very excited about this new perspective but didn’t really have time to dive into it. By the time I handed those applications in, I hadn’t really decided how it all fitted together. I still haven’t.

I can see the beginnings of a constellation of ideas:

• an Orient that moves around geographically depending on where one was standing;

• the study of ‘the Orient’ as a way of defining Europeanness. English men on the very edge of empire in Southeast Asia and Finnish men on the very edge of Europe as it was traditionally defined were both making the case by studying ‘the Orient’ that they, as people who studies those other places, were all the same (or at least similar): a collective ‘us’ versus ‘them’.

But, like I said, it’s the details that matter. How did this play out for specific people in particular places?

Hopefully one day I get the time to find out more. For now, I’ve got new threads to follow. The stew is changing slowly, subtly, into something more interesting than I expected. And when I’m in Istanbul, working on something else, I’ll be looking out for other clues. I’m there to study coins minted in the Middle Ages, but those coins were studied by people much more recently. I’ll be looking for who they were, why they were interested and what words they used to describe what they were doing. Some dishes are best served really slow…

1. Said, Edward W., Orientalism, Penguin Modern Classics, 2003 reprint (Penguin Books, 1978).