How To Make Sense Of A Chaotic World - Professor Wang Gungwu

Prof Wang 00:00:19

I've been asked to respond to all that has been said, but having written 300 pages already about my rather long life, I shall only tell two stories.

My first is that the book launching today is not volume three of my memoirs. Margaret had inspired me to write Home Is Not Here for our children. Tommy may remember this — when he launched that book, he pointed out that I was then 88 years old and the book only covered the first 19 years of my life. He did his sums and concluded that I had another four volumes to write. Everybody laughed.

My alumni friends then asked: if home is not here, where was it? You had not arrived in Singapore, and none of us appear in the book. How can you write about home when you had not even met Margaret?

So it was again Margaret who helped me answer the question. After we married, we had moved house six times — twice from Cambridge to London, twice in Singapore, and twice in Kuala Lumpur. Our seventh move was into the new house that she had helped to design and build in Paling Ja. Three years later, in 1968, when we were leaving that house to go to Canberra and I looked dejected, Margaret said, "Home is where we are." And she was right. Those words became the title of our book and completed our story of home.

My other story is about the title of my new book, No Borders. I was asked: what do you mean? There are borders everywhere — notably those created when departing empires produced new nations. The whole world has borders drawn largely by Western European powers.

But here is a paradox. That world order was dominated by a civilisation that claimed to represent universal values — a world with no borders. In any case, my journeys have nothing to do with being civilised or with trying to be cosmopolitan. My story is actually very simple.

I discovered that all borders were drawn for a purpose, and sometimes those borders are radically changed. But there are no borders between civilisations. And for me as a student of history, time also has no borders. Nothing remains unchanged between past and present.

I was ten years old when I first noticed borders in an atlas I was given. There were places marked in red within the borders of the British Empire. My town was in the middle of one of those red patches. Years later, when I returned from Nanjing, I found the empire was gone, and the Federation of Malaya was about to become a nation state. Nine Malay sultanates and two former colonies would now share a border. But there was an anomaly: the country's university, the University of Malaya, was outside the country, in the colony of Singapore.

When Malaya became Malaysia to include Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah, I worked hard to promote the new nation — but only saw its borders changed yet again when Singapore separated. At the same time, I had become a historian of China and learned that throughout its recorded history, every dynasty had different borders. For a while, even the United Nations could not agree where China's borders were.

I concluded that changing and crossing borders was normal. My own experience with universities confirmed that. I was a Chinese who only lived and studied in China when I was seventeen and eighteen years old. I then became a federal citizen of Malaya and later an Australian citizen so that I could continue my studies and pursue a scholarly career.

I was lucky. Each of the universities I worked in gave me the freedom to learn and teach, and my colleagues and students helped me adapt to different local conditions. Whether the universities were in China, Malaya, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, or Singapore, I saw no borders. That made it easier for me to make myself useful wherever I was.

In short, I could go on with my work to connect the past with the present, and look for links that would help me identify possibilities for the future. I could do that best by exploring our region between islands and continents. That exploration has guided my work and became the story of my life — the subject of this book.

Thank you all so much for coming to this launch.

Keith 00:06:44

It's my great privilege and pleasure to be here today. Let me first pay homage to Professor Wang. I had him on my podcast a while back, and that video did quite well — around 100,000 views — and I've had many listeners email me saying it rekindled their sense of wonder and interest in history.

Soon after, Pagitawi Jawan from Indonesia wrote to me saying they were thinking of flying down to Singapore to interview Professor Wang. They did, and I sat in on a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, enraptured throughout. I consider it a great act of service and love that you've continued to inspire so many younger generations here today. Professor Wang, I'd like to first express my thanks to you.

Professor Wang, I wanted to start with a question that bothered me a little — mainly because I think it reflected my own incompetence. You wrote this line in your book: "Amid the great turbulence, the historian could always see some semblance of structure." Many of us, when we see chaos and disorder in the world today, feel disoriented and confused. How do you see a sense of order in chaotic times?

Prof Wang 00:08:06

I have a very simple understanding of the human condition: all of us seek order because we cannot stand chaos. We can't stand the turbulence we so often meet. So we all work for order. And I am deeply impressed by the fact that people everywhere have worked so hard throughout history to achieve it — and yet, again and again, they have failed.

I've come to think that failure is probably inevitable, owing to our own lack of capacity to understand ourselves. That is why I think the past is so important. The past may not tell us everything, but being aware of it — and learning from it — can at least make the turbulence and chaos of the future more manageable, more liveable.

There are no simple answers to order because order has never lasted very long. Almost invariably, it fails because the vast majority of people can't quite cope, can't keep order, and can't sustain it for extended periods. The reasons are too complicated to go into here. But when you look across the sweep of history, it is remarkable how consistently people can turn success into failure.

All I can say, as a natural optimist, is: thank goodness that almost every time, after a period of failure, people succeed again in re-establishing a new kind of order — always hoping it will last longer and be better. And that is something one can hold on to: the hope that we may one day be capable enough, and wise enough, to sustain that vision longer and longer into the future.

But I'm not certain, because in my lifetime, while things were much slower when I was young, they've become much faster today. The speed at which things change now makes it almost impossible to keep up with what is happening each day. In the days when things moved more slowly, people had more time to think, to plan, and to adjust — and yet they still failed. So with the speed we are going, how can we as human beings build the capacity to cope? That is a puzzle to me.

I may be entirely wrong. We may have reached a stage where new technologies can help us overcome the disorder we so regularly face. But I'm not sure. All I can say is that I hope we have learned, and I hope we will continue to learn from the past.

Keith 00:12:02

Looking back at your life, you've witnessed revolutions, the birth of new nations, and the birth of new orders. I'd like to ask you to give us an object lesson — to really draw home the point of how one sees order in a time of chaos. Perhaps it might be useful to look back, from your early days as a young historian until now: what was the most turbulent period you lived through, and how did you make sense of it?

Prof Wang 00:12:34

There are so many stories one could tell, but let me give you two quite obvious examples that you may find relevant.

The first is the Treaty of Westphalia. From that point onwards, we began to develop the idea of borders and an attempt to bring about a new peace — to avoid wars that had arisen from thirty years of conflict in which millions were killed, with people of the same religion killing each other mercilessly. But after thirty years of killing, they decided they must find a way to prevent future bloodshed. They met, reached an agreement that there would be borders, that people would respect those borders, and would not cross them to attack or intervene elsewhere. And it lasted for quite a long while.

It eventually led to the creation of new nations — the idea of the nation state, each recognising the sovereignty of the other, recognising its borders, and recognising that its citizens had all the rights of a citizenry. That was a tremendous step forward. So there was one example where, after total misery and thirty years of killing, people conceived of a world that would minimise further killing — and they succeeded for quite a long while.

The second example is that the nation state idea, with the national empires that followed, didn't work in the end. Those national empires fought each other to a standstill in the First and Second World Wars and virtually destroyed themselves. All of Western Europe was subjected to absolute destruction of the worst kind. And yet again, at the end of it all, the human condition proved remarkable. With great optimism, they reconstructed a new world — the United Nations. As a young student, I was utterly amazed and full of admiration for the ideals set out for it: a world of innumerable nations, all equal, all sovereign, all independent, with the question of respecting borders absolute in the idea of sovereignty.

That raised great hopes. I think the efforts were genuine, highly idealistic, and the work of tremendous numbers of people trying to make it work. And it did work for a while. Despite all the problems — the rivalries, the ideological differences, the ambitions of those who wished to dominate — for about forty or fifty years, there was a kind of balance in which people respected each other enough to prevent the worst of wars.

And yet when the Cold War that enabled that balance came to an end, when it looked as if one superpower could now manage and enforce the rules of the United Nations and deliver a world of peace — it all went wrong. I cannot fully explain what went wrong; it is too complicated. But when people had that power and were expected to use it wisely, they failed. And when that happened, a series of events destroyed the illusion that one superpower could enforce the rules that make the United Nations truly successful — not just based on mutual deterrence, but on genuine principles. What we have seen over the last forty years is a steady decline from those ideals, and a slow erosion of faith in the very things that created that hope.

So what went wrong? I cannot explain it simply. But certainly the lesson of the past is that we should not be surprised. There is no such thing as a perfect order that will last forever. It fails again and again. And yet, at the back of it all, there remains that recurring fact of history: that after a period of failure, people learn enough to try and rebuild something better. So I still have that hope — being a natural optimist — that somewhere, some group of people will reconstruct a new vision of peace, drawing on the lessons of the past.

Keith 00:18:20

Thank you for sharing that. I had a chance to speak with Professor Tommy and Professor Kishore, and I think you join them in that remarkable conviction of being both UN lovers and eternal optimists — seeing the failures and the tragedies, and yet remaining committed to progress.

With that, I'd like to ask you a question about your work as a historian. You recounted in your book your first published article in the Journal of Sinology in 1957, where you made a comment about how Thucydides and Herodotus shaped the way history writing was done in the West. What struck me as a throwaway line was actually quite profound. I'd like to ask you: what did you mean by that? How did these two figures impact Western historiography? And then, how did China's own tradition shape its understanding of history? Where did the two schools of thought diverge?

Prof Wang 00:19:32

What truly impressed me was seeing how Asian historians had spent so much time thinking about their own experiences and drawing lessons from them for the future. Thucydides is a very good example — he drew entirely from his own experiences and tried to sum them up to provide ideas for a better world. Herodotus had a wider perspective, but the same fundamental idea was there: that the collective experience of all the peoples one could learn about, and all the lessons that could be drawn, could lead us to a better world. If we understand that world better, we will be better placed. All of them seemed to embody, for me, faith in the idea that we can learn from the past — and that we should try.

So historians were not simply people searching for truth. What they were really looking for were lessons to learn from the past. That is my reading of even the Greco-Roman tradition of history.

But you also ask about Chinese history, and there it is even more obvious. Look at how the Chinese wrote history. The greatest of them was Sima Qian, but before him there were earlier records. The emphasis of his great work was not about history as we understand it today. Although we translate his work as "histories," the word shi actually means records and documents. What he was really saying is: we now have a collection of records and documents about the past. They have been preserved. We must read through them, ensure they are genuine, authentic, correct, and accurate, and pick from them those that will help us understand what lessons we can learn.

His successor Ban Gu, who wrote the history of the Han dynasty — between the two of them, with Shiji and Hanshu, they set the pattern of a historical tradition that essentially says: we learn from the past and transmit it to the future, so that the same mistakes will not be repeated. The documents are there to prove what was done correctly and what was done badly, causing the decline and fall of a dynasty, and showing where bad rulers appeared.

Behind it all was a kind of moral — not an ordinary moral between individuals, but a model of governance. Governance itself carried a moral lesson, because it was founded on the idea that you govern because you care for the people. That is the Mandate of Heaven. Heaven chose you as a ruler because you were supposed to care for the people. If you did, the people would live happily, social harmony would prevail, and stability would follow. But because rulers make mistakes — because they are greedy, corrupt, or surrounded by ambitious men — all kinds of private interests come in the way of good governance, and it begins to decline.

This became a tradition whereby every dynasty would learn from the previous one by collecting and selecting records to illustrate where that dynasty did well and where it failed, and why it had ultimately been overthrown and replaced by a new dynasty with a new Mandate of Heaven. That mandate was determined by the fact that the people had rebelled and overthrown you — that told you that you had failed and the people no longer accepted you.

Every dynasty did this for the previous one. It became, in a sense, a new profession — sifting through documents to draw lessons from the past and teach them to the future. In the Tang dynasty, they actually established a history office precisely to collect documents even as the dynasty was unfolding, to preserve evidence of what constituted good governance and what did not. At the end of a dynasty, you collected it all and began again. Every dynasty did this, all the way down to the twentieth century.

In fact, even today, the Chinese face the problem of writing the history of the Qing dynasty, which has not been completed — because modern Chinese historians thought: we no longer need to do that. We are modern historians now. So they took modern history to begin in 1840 with the Opium War, which means Chinese history has no proper beginning or end, because anything before 1840 is treated as pre-modern, or even ancient. That completely distorted the Chinese rhythm of historical telling.

But what I find fascinating is that the present regime — after two revolutions and having tried so hard to learn from modern Western civilisation, both from liberal capitalism and from European socialism, both of which flow from the same Enlightenment period — has learned from the west, tried to absorb it, and yet found that it cannot copy either tradition and still remain Chinese. Something else, some other wisdom from its own past, was calling to them. I cannot summarise it for them because that is how they see it. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I try to understand it.

And they are doing it by referring to their own past — to learn what not to do, what not to fail at. If you look at Chinese historiographers today, they no longer speak of Marxist history, the model they had learnt from the west. Even though they are called the Communist Party of China, they no longer use the Marxist historical model. What they are asking instead is: what went wrong with the Cultural Revolution? What went wrong with the Republic of China after 1911? What went wrong with the Qing dynasty?

The irony is that if you look at the most popular books, television shows, and films being made in China today, they are great admirers of the eighteenth century — the century of peace, stability, and prosperity under three Qing emperors: Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, who together covered the whole of the eighteenth century. And they were not even Chinese. They were Manchu — conquerors of China. And yet it was under them that China became more prosperous than ever before, stable, free of major internal wars, with determined borders, and with the confidence that China had become great again. And yet it was precisely at that peak that things began to go wrong.

So again there are lessons. When the British arrived in the nineteenth century, they found the Chinese utterly incapable of dealing with a relatively small number of foreign ships arriving at their coast — simply because they had neglected the sea. What I want to emphasise is that the Chinese look back and say: yes, there was a great period long before we learned from the west. So what was it? What was there?

This led them back to their own history. And I am very struck by how often professional historians as well as policymakers refer to Chinese history for examples of both success and failure. The perfect example is corruption — which Xi Jinping uses as a tremendously powerful weapon to try and control the country today. And if you look across the whole of Chinese history, almost every dynasty points to corruption as one of the major reasons for its decline and fall.

What is extraordinary is how the people respond to that. They find it extremely easy to understand: we must root out corruption, at least minimise it enough to enable the country to survive and prosper. And the examples are there in every dynasty history — in the second half of each dynasty, corruption was invariably the central issue.

I don't think that is accidental. There is something to it: the system goes wrong when people become corrupt, and when leaders are incapable of, or unwilling to, stem it in time. And Xi Jinping is also learning from history — not only China's history but others' as well. I was struck when he came to power and said the first thing we must learn from is the Soviet Union. What did he mean? He asked: why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fail? If we had modelled ourselves on them, and they failed after eighty or ninety years, are we not in the same danger? And they identified corruption as one of the key causes.

So it is a coupling of a kind of Marxist understanding of the Soviet Communist Party's destruction with a reading of Chinese history — to say that saving the Chinese Communist Party is saving China, and to save China, one must learn from all the mistakes and all the lessons that history offers.

I find that quite extraordinary. And I think it comes quite naturally to the Chinese. It reflects a completely different understanding of history from the Western tradition — where history is the search for truth. That is entirely respectable, and I agree with it. But the fact is, there is another question: what do you learn from the past that will enable you to avoid at least some of the worst mistakes as you move into the future?

Keith 00:34:18

Thank you, Professor Wang, for indulging us. I had about fifteen questions prepared, but I've cut it down to three. I thought it would be useful to quickly open the floor for questions.

Ambassador Chan asks: if corruption is constantly the lesson drawn from dynasty to dynasty, do Chinese rulers or historians arrive at the idea that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Did they ever draw that lesson from history?

Prof Wang 00:34:48

That is a very good question. I probably cannot prove that the Chinese explicitly understood the idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But they acted as if that were true. I don't think they ever spelled it out as a formula distilled from history — they were probably not certain it was always the case — but they acted as if it were.

What is telling is that instead of doing what the West did — establishing constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, to ensure rulers do not acquire too much or absolute power — the Chinese from the very beginning discarded the idea of the rule of law in that sense. Instead, they emphasised the rule of li — proper behaviour, a profound respect for relationships between people. From that, you develop a way of behaving that recognises what is correct, what is moral, what is good, and what demonstrates care for the people.

The Confucian idea of the good ruler is someone who obviously cares for the people and proves it, again and again. Whenever something goes wrong — a great famine, a foreign invasion, locusts destroying the crops — there is a tremendous response from the central government to show that it cares. The historical records document the moments when emperors responded immediately and officials did their duty to minimise damage and restore order, safety, and security to the people.

All of this was accepted — not through law, but through moral conduct. Law simplifies things by laying them down in explicit terms. The Chinese rejected that, and for good reason. There were legalists who advocated for the law and used very severe punishments to deter wrongdoing — but the Confucians rejected it, arguing that either you end up punishing the wrong people or you produce great injustice, because there is no way to guarantee that laws will be properly carried out unless the people administering them are themselves good. Morality, quality of character, and a genuine sense of right and wrong — that is what matters. If you fail to embody that, law is meaningless.

This is what Confucius wanted to emphasise. In a way, the Chinese were responding to the reality of the past — recognising, without quite articulating it as a formula, the truth that absolute power corrupts absolutely — and trying to prevent it through the ethics of the ruler and the moral demands of governance.

Keith 00:38:31

Professor Kishore asks: I'd like to pose a puzzle about Southeast Asia. This is one of the most diverse regions in the world — religiously, culturally, and linguistically — with large Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and other communities living side by side. And yet, paradoxically, Southeast Asia has been relatively peaceful compared to other regions that are arguably less diverse. In South Asia, for example, the differences between Pakistan and India, or Bangladesh and India, are not as vast as what we see across Southeast Asia, yet conflict has been frequent. In Europe, despite deep cultural familiarity between Russians and their European neighbours, we are witnessing one of the most brutal wars in recent history.

So the real question is: why has Southeast Asia, despite its immense diversity, avoided major wars among its member states, apart from isolated conflicts like Thailand and Cambodia? When you attend ASEAN meetings, there is a noticeable comfort level among leaders — they sit together and speak to one another with a certain ease. Where does that comfort come from? What are the historical roots of this relative peace and mutual accommodation among Southeast Asian societies?

Prof Wang 00:40:07

That is a very large question, but let me try to simplify it — at least for myself; it may not satisfy everyone.

I was struck by the fact that Southeast Asia was the furthest away from the Eurasian continent. It lay between two oceans, and long before we developed the ships that could traverse those oceans with ease, the sea was a dangerous place. No major navies were ever developed in the waters between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. So my starting point is this: Southeast Asia was furthest from the Eurasian continent — and the Eurasian continent was where the major struggles took place, where people fought over territory on land, where the mobility of horseback riders and their later equivalents could cross continents at great speed. If you had superior horses, you could dominate the world, and it happened again and again.

Even India — the south of India, entirely flanked by ocean — was relatively peaceful. What really went wrong for India came from the northwest frontier, from Central Asia. Where did all the enemies of India come from? Central Asia. Where did all the enemies of China come from? Central Asia. Even the Indo-Europeans who came to dominate Europe originated from Eurasia — they moved west instead of east, because it was too cold in the north. They moved in all the other three directions. But Southeast Asia was beyond their reach, because there was ocean.

So I think Southeast Asia was, from that point of view, very fortunate. And when new ideas did arrive, they could be accepted freely — there was nothing forced upon them. People could pick and choose. When they encountered Indian civilisation, it came at a time of peace. It was not the period of Turko-Mongol invasions or Persian conquests — those all came from the northwest frontier. The ocean was left to the Indians and the peoples of Southeast Asia, and they learned from one another without difficulty. Indian civilisation permeated Southeast Asia for a thousand years because it was peaceful, because it was something you could selectively absorb. Nobody forced it upon you.

As for China — Chinese civilisation was concentrated in the north, constantly threatened by northern invaders. They never concerned themselves with the south. Once they reached the coast, they stopped. Their problems were in the north. In fact, one of China's great achievements was learning to manage those northern invaders across so many dynasties. But in the end, that very success became a weakness — they never anticipated that they could be attacked by sea from the south. That was their final mistake. But they were right, for thousands of years, to focus on the north.

So what China offered Southeast Asia was different from what India offered. China offered trade, technology, and economic benefit. What is striking is that Chinese civilisation was so compact in its own way — defined by an extraordinarily complex linguistic and moral system — that it was very difficult to simply adopt it from the outside. The Chinese had no missionaries; they never set out to spread their civilisation. People either adopted it or they didn't. By the time Chinese civilisation reached the coast of Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia was already deeply Indianised, all the way to Vietnam. What Southeast Asia needed from China was not cultural transmission, but what China could provide practically — trade, economic relationships, and specific technologies that were new to them. It was a very happy relationship.

So the Indian influence brought aesthetic, musical, artistic, philosophical, and moral values to Southeast Asia, while the Chinese brought trade and technology. I am oversimplifying, of course, but the fundamental point stands: the distance from Eurasia was what made Southeast Asia a special place.

And even today we face the same reality. When people talk about the Indo-Pacific, they speak as if it were some new invention. On the contrary, the Indo-Pacific is the most ancient set of relationships between those two oceans, and the people who benefited most were those of Southeast Asia, lying between them. If the Indo-Pacific means anything and has a future, Southeast Asia has a good future.

Keith 00:46:48

What do you think your unique contribution as a historian is?

Prof Wang 00:46:55

When Tommy mentioned it, I hesitated — I still hesitate — to call myself a historian, because I don't do history the way professional historians do it today. They are guided by a scientific goal that I respect: the search for truth. I totally respect that. Except that my understanding of the past is that the past keeps changing. Every time a new document is found, history has to be rewritten. So history doesn't stay fixed for very long. You're constantly rewriting it whether you like it or not.

If that is the case, then professional historians are well positioned — they will always have work to do. And I've seen people rewrite history so often over just the last few decades, including the history of Singapore, that I think we have to be very careful about saying: this is the truth, this is history, this is fixed. In that sense, I'm not a historian. I'm not out to find the truth, because I know the truth will always elude me. Who knows whether by tomorrow a new document will appear from somewhere and show that things didn't happen the way we thought?

And then I ask myself: does that really matter? For those who search for truth, the scientific method is entirely respectable, and I respect it. But for myself, it doesn't help me understand the past if it keeps changing all the time. What is more important is that I remain aware it can change, that I hold my understanding provisionally, and ask: if this is how we understand the past for now, does it tell us anything? Does it teach us anything? How does it help us deal with the present and the future?

That is what has come to interest me. I don't know whether it sets me apart from others. I think many historians, whether or not they realise it, are doing something similar. And of course, you can also abuse the past — pick from it what you want to use to influence people to do what you want. That is another way of using history. I hope I don't do that. All I really want is to find out whether there are lessons worth learning, and what lessons can be drawn from what we know. If we don't know something, don't pretend that we do. Try to find connections and links between the past of one part of the world and another.

I am constantly struck by the fact that human beings in very different parts of the world very often behave in remarkably similar ways. They may not recognise it — all sorts of cultural and ideological factors keep them separate. But if you actually look at how human beings behave when they are ambitious, or greedy, or cruel, they do very similar things. And if you go far enough to trace what actually happened, the causes are very similar too. They are not all that different.

When you look at it that way, it gives us a better way of understanding what we are like as human beings. I don't think I am fundamentally different from other historians, but I have been consistently concerned that the search for truth should not be the only thing history is for. History should also be understood and used — as best we can — to help us think about the future and its possibilities.

Keith 01:00:43

So the lesson I take from that is: standardised examinations are a way to kill creativity and destroy a civilisation. I suppose that's the right lesson to draw.

Perhaps we have time for one last question. Professor Wu from the Penang Institute asks: we know that geography plays a crucial role in shaping history and politics. At the same time, we have to be careful not to overstate its influence or fall into geographic determinism. How should we think about the proper weight to give geography in our understanding of historical and political developments?

Prof Wang 01:01:27

I actually agree with the concern. I don't want to sound geographically deterministic at all. But I raise geography because it cannot be ignored — it is a vital part of historical understanding. History is not only about time; it is also about space. What space do you occupy? How do you use it? What do you make of it? How do you use that space to gain what you want — power, wealth, influence? So it's not just geography in itself, but the agency of the human groups involved — how they can make use of, or take advantage of, whatever geographical features they find, to maximise their strength.

A good example — and one I haven't mentioned enough — is the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean has nothing to do with the Eurasian heartland. It is just a small sea, almost entirely enclosed, with the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, a small opening to the Black Sea, and no direct access to the Red Sea. Geographically, you might expect it to be limited in historical significance. Yet the opposite happened: because of the intensity of relationships within that small sea, all the peoples involved were so close, so proximate to one another, that they had to engage with each other constantly — fighting, trading, exchanging ideas.

Unlike Southeast Asia, which was widely dispersed across vast oceans where people on one side of the Indian Ocean could barely interact with those on the other, the Mediterranean was compressed. From the days of the Cretan Empire, the Egyptians, the civilisations of the Tigris-Euphrates region, they were all participating in this shared space. The Persians against the Greeks — probably no accident that we still speak of Iran today as a major force in the world — the Greeks representing city-states and something like democracy, the Persians a more centralised imperial power. That war between Greeks and Persians was the best example of what the Mediterranean was doing to all its peoples.

The Greek colonies spread everywhere; the Romans built upon it; the various peoples of North Africa became more and more intensely connected with one another. They created a very distinct civilisation — not only through trade and military exchange, but through the exchange of philosophies, of religion, of visions of the future. Great philosophers and religious leaders emerged precisely from that crucible of conflict. They were improving themselves all the time through the intensity of their encounters.

And yet, out of that intensity, they found they could not remain contained within the Mediterranean alone. They had to find a way out. And they were blocked — the conquest of the North African coast by Islamic forces in the seventh century transformed the Mediterranean into a space divided between Christians and Muslims. The Crusades lasted nearly a thousand years. And the net result was that the Mediterranean was effectively cut off from the trade of India and China — the two wealthiest parts of the world — for those who were not Muslim. That intensified the crusading wars between Islam and Christendom, and eventually forced Europeans to look to the Atlantic, something they had never dared to do, because they believed the earth was flat and that venturing too far would mean falling off the edge.

The idea that the earth was round had to come first — and it is quite extraordinary how long that took. Eventually, people came to believe that if you went the other way, you could reach India. And that is what they set out to do. Nobody knew about the Americas. They were heading for India. The Spanish sailed west; the Portuguese went the other way, down the African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. Why did they do that? Because they could not reach India or China any other way. They were completely blocked — except for the brief window of the Pax Mongolica, which Marco Polo had described with such vivid stories, making Europeans want even more desperately to reach China and India, while being even more frustrated by the Muslims who blocked the overland routes.

So they went round. And when they arrived in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, what made the decisive difference was something they had perfected in the confined waters of the Mediterranean: how to fire a cannon from a ship without sinking it. All the navies of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea had never solved this problem. It was the Mediterranean peoples who perfected it, and the Portuguese who became the greatest cannon builders of their era. The first century of Portuguese victories in Asia was entirely about Portuguese cannons. They transformed the Indian Ocean. The same was true of the Pacific — once the Spanish arrived, they too brought galleons that could fire without sinking, and no Asian navy could cope.

What I also find fascinating is how the Portuguese became mercenaries, working for different kingdoms across Southeast Asia and Asia as experts in cannon building. Technology changes everything — once the technology shifts, everyone wants it. But none of them could match the Portuguese for a long time. It was only later, with the Dutch and the English, that superior naval power put the Portuguese aside.

Then the English and the Dutch created something altogether new — something that had nothing to do with cannons. It had to do with capitalism: the idea of a commercial empire, of building power through trade alone. You need ports, you need control, you need monopolies. You dominate the trade and you win. But it means fighting everyone for control of those ports. And from that comes the whole story of Western dominance thereafter. By the eighteenth century, the British Navy was the strongest in the world, and nobody could challenge it effectively for another hundred and fifty years.

Keith 01:10:42

From China to the Mediterranean, from the printing press to the cannon — it's no wonder the book is titled No Borders. Once again, thank you all for coming. May we give Professor Wang a round of applause.