Modern History of East Asian Martial Arts

However, rather than simply being clones of it, East Asian modernities are highly distinctive, spawning institutions, customs, values and ideologies shaped by their own histories and cultures. In Part I, I will explore how modernity came to be indelibly associated with Europe, and more broadly the West, and how East Asia is now in the process of prising that relationship apart. 2.В The Rise of the West By the mid nineteenth century, European supremacy over East Asia had been clearly established, most graphically in Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War in 1839- 42. But when did it start? There is a temptation to date it from considerably earlier. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that China ’s history after the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and especially after the genius of the Song dynasty (960-1279), was to blaze an altogether less innovative trail. Writing of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), for example, the historian David Landes suggests that: †China had long slipped into technological and scientific torpor, coasting along on previous gains and losing speed as talent yielded to gentility.’ As a result, he argues: вЂSo the years passed and the decades and the centuries ...»