Book review: Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China
| Author | Astrid HM Nordin |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836714560175 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Cooperation and Conflict
2015, Vol. 50(4) 550 –552
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836714560175
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Book review: Liberal
Barbarism
ERIK RINGMAR, Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China.
London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013.
In this book, Erik Ringmar introduces readers to the events and discourses that enabled
the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, the Chinese imperial palace, at the hands of English
and French forces in 1860. The book juxtaposes the urge by these Western powers to
civilise the Chinese with the looting and subsequent burning of Yuanmingyuan that he
sees as an act of barbarism, asking how the two are linked. To answer this question, the
book turns to the performative nature of the encounter between a Western system of
formally equal states, and a Chinese imperial system based on symbolic hierarchy. The
book argues that much of what unfolded in the run-up to the burning of Yuanmingyuan
had to do with the incompatibility of the two systems, and their associated ways of
conducting relations and diplomacy. More fundamentally, however, it had to do with
who these Europeans were and how they saw their place in the world.
The book therefore focuses on the French and English attitudes to China and to the
looting and burning of Yuanmingyuan. The book draws on a range of philosophical
works in a well-informed manner, but its real strength comes out when it draws on the
personal accounts of Europeans who observed or participated in the destruction of the
imperial palace. It quotes from journals and letters written at the time to give readers an
insight into how various Europeans who engaged in the events in one way or another
thought about their own participation in (or resistance to) the destruction of Yuanmingyuan.
At times, it seems a pity that we are not given similar access to Chinese accounts.
Indeed, with the book’s emphasis on the performative and the relational, it is odd that so
little is said about the reception of the European performance by the Chinese, and how
some Chinese may have been part of producing a particular performance in the first
place. It would have been interesting to juxtapose the European soldiers’ and officials’
accounts to that of their Chinese counterparts. On occasion, the absence of Chinese
accounts leads to strongly underplaying, if not completely writing-out, Chinese agency
from this story. For example, it is said that the Chinese empire had lived in its own world
before 1860, but that it was forced to live in a world of Europe’s making after that point.
This is indeed a common simplification of events, but one that has been challenged in
recent literature, for example in Pär K Cassel’s Grounds of Judgement: Extraterritoriality
and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan, which shows Chinese
actors to have had far more agency in shaping ‘unequal treaties’ than is commonly
recognised. Having said this, Liberal Barbarism is explicitly concerned with the self-image
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