Consuls and captives: Dutch–North African diplomacy in the early modern Mediterranean

Abstract

The big pirate Cai Qian’s activities were also based on such a kind of local ecology. The last section maps the scene of how local elites in Fujian played their roles during the transformative periods (from Ming to Qing and during the late Qing) in terms of military leader, religious master, and literati or intellectuals. Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) united the late-Ming maritime powers to resist the Qing and the Dutch; Master Yinyuan crossed the sea to Japan in search of military assistance to the antiQing agenda; Lin Zhen took a journey to the United States for teaching Chinese as well as learning the advanced western knowledge and left a valuable work in the mid-nineteenth century; Xu Jishe collected sources and published the famous Yinghuan zhilüe (A Short Account of the Maritime Circuit) in Fuzhou for ‘opening the eyes to observe the world’ in terms of the ocean. From these solid case studies, Yang moves further to reflect upon how to narrate Chinese maritime history. This also echoes his earlier searching for the ocean and the fate of the Chinese civilisation. Taking Mediterranean civilisations as a measure, some scholars argue that China had a maritime culture, but it was not a maritime civilisation. Leaving alone the dubious debates on culture and civilisation, Yang doubts whether there was only one civilisation in a nation-state (not to mention an empire). Yang points out that in a compound civilised state, a civilisation not dominated by a main discourse or even a ‘historical choice’ still is a civilisation. Furthermore, limiting Chinese maritime culture to a certain region and regarding it as the characteristic of ‘local culture’ is improper (e.g. Fujian is ‘the most typical area of Chinese marine civilisation’). After all, this shallow observation cuts off the connection between the local and thewhole (Haiyangwenming lun yuHaiyang Zhongguo [The discourse ofmaritime civilisation and maritime China]). Due to the characteristic of a collection of papers, one might sometimes feel that the whole book is a little loose. However, on one issue of central importance, the evaluation of maritime China, the author does bring together his insights into both the particular and the general, the historical narrative and the historical discourse.