History

The Second Reich’s post-Otto von Bismarck foreign policy was militaristic and expansionist but unpredictable. It built a high seas fleet, armed itself, and acquired colonies, in which it committed one of the first 20th-century genocides. It cultivated the Ottoman Empire in a way broadly similar to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, funding development and building infrastructure, such as railways, through Syria and Mesopotamia and sending specialists to train in its uses.

There are plenty of similarities between Beijing today and Berlin then, but whether they’re superficial or profound is a debatable question. In the late 19th century, Germany was an aggressive rising power, one that made plentiful appeals to the past but which was only a few decades old in its modern form. Its economic growth was very late and very fast. Between 1880 and 1913, Germany’s industrial exports grew from less than half of Britain’s to overtaking it. Germany’s huge industrial firms were backed up by German diplomacy. Author Ernest Edwin Williams’s Made in Germany described how cheap German goods flooded the British market: Germans worked harder for longer hours and worse pay; they weren’t allowed to strike.

For some time, more erudite foreign-policy commentators have been comparing modern China to late 19th century Germany . It’s an argument that has a certain appeal, but it’s also one that may be as revealing about those making it as these countries themselves. The real crux of this argument may not be in the similarities between these two rising nations but in how others see them—and why.

For some time, more erudite foreign-policy commentators have been comparing modern China to late 19th century Germany. It’s an argument that has a certain appeal, but it’s also one that may be as revealing about those making it as these countries themselves. The real crux of this argument may not be in the similarities between these two rising nations but in how others see them—and why.

There are plenty of similarities between Beijing today and Berlin then, but whether they’re superficial or profound is a debatable question. In the late 19th century, Germany was an aggressive rising power, one that made plentiful appeals to the past but which was only a few decades old in its modern form. Its economic growth was very late and very fast. Between 1880 and 1913, Germany’s industrial exports grew from less than half of Britain’s to overtaking it. Germany’s huge industrial firms were backed up by German diplomacy. Author Ernest Edwin Williams’s Made in Germany described how cheap German goods flooded the British market: Germans worked harder for longer hours and worse pay; they weren’t allowed to strike.

The Second Reich’s post-Otto von Bismarck foreign policy was militaristic and expansionist but unpredictable. It built a high seas fleet, armed itself, and acquired colonies, in which it committed one of the first 20th-century genocides. It cultivated the Ottoman Empire in a way broadly similar to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, funding development and building infrastructure, such as railways, through Syria and Mesopotamia and sending specialists to train in its uses.

A Kaiser who spent meetings drawing battleships in the margins of his papers would have been on board for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “wolf warrior diplomacy.” Like modern China, pre-World War I Germany alienated other powers with avoidable diplomatic blunders and thoughtless shows of force, turning disputes into incidents like the Agadir Crisis.

Germany’s rise—and the threat that came with it—was a matter of deep concern to other world powers. German invasion literature was a mainstay of Britain’s bestseller list for nearly half a century, from 1871’s The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer to Saki’s When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps just before World War I itself. France had less of the genre, in part because the country’s first defeat and humiliation by Germany had already happened in the Franco-Prussian War; German power was not a future hypothetical but an existing reality.

Attempts to explain Germany were common in middlebrow English-speaking discourse before, during, and after the world wars. In this distorted gaze, common practices and traits appeared exotic while aspects of German society that really were singular were unexamined or unseen. Journalist William Shirer said Germans act according to self-interest rather than consistent ethics; they attack others but get angry when attacked. So do most human beings. Like China now, early 20th-century Germany appeared self-contradictory in descriptions like this; there is no group taken as a mass that would not.

Skewed translations, which researcher Jake Eberts dubbed “phrenology for words” when applied to Chinese, supported the impression that Germany was uniquely militaristic by defamiliarizing ordinary German words. Warlord is English for Kriegsherr, used from the early modern period until World War II: It means the head of state or commanding general who carries out war. The connotation is neither overly violent nor overly restrained; in English, a “warlord” is brutal and illegitimate. Calling former German Emperor Wilhelm II or former Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph the “supreme warlord” as a calque for “Oberster Kriegsherr” depicts them in a light “commander in chief” does not.

Just as China poses a problem for analysts who until very recently had been confident that modernization would bring with it democracy, openness, and Westernization, so was Germany a historical problem that needed to be explained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There were hardly a lot of existing models of successful Western democracies right before World War I; in assuming Germany was an explanandum, these discussions idealized other polities. To put it bluntly, they asked why Germany failed to become France.

A sophisticated version of this narrative was Germany was unusual because it had never undergone a bourgeois revolution. Instead, the revolutions of 1848 failed or were suppressed, and Germany was eventually unified through Prussian armed conquest. According to this explanation, Germany’s economic and productive infrastructure developed but its social institutions did not: The German middle class was unusually weak and made common cause with the aristocracy instead of accruing political power. By the end of the 19th century, Germany was supposedly an advanced capitalist industrial society still led by agricultural elites. Without a strong bourgeoisie, Germany missed essential preconditions for the development of liberal democracy like freedom of the press, the rule of law, universal individual civil rights, or government based on social contracts and was therefore unusually vulnerable to fascism.

Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, these arguments were dismantled. Newer studies pointed out that German historians relied on a simplified representation of English and French history, which most historians of those countries no longer used. Saying Germany had a “failed bourgeois revolution” implies other so-called modern states passed through successful bourgeois revolutions; calling the German bourgeoisie unusual assumes a rising middle class should be liberal.

Asking why Germany did not develop like the United Kingdom or France assumes these political entities developed the way all countries should have. It distorts or ignores their histories. Calling the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution a bourgeois revolution like the French Revolution twists the history of one polity to fit a predetermined narrative formed on the basis of another. On the other hand, taking France as the model for development overstates substantially the stability of a nation-state that veered from one political system to another during the 19th and 20th centuries, including at least one violent civil war. (Not coincidentally, many historians who explained the problem of Germany by comparisons to a non-problematic other country were German exiles who had magnified the virtues of countries that had not betrayed them.)

The idea that middle class individuals are agents of modernization also informed the later theory that history was converging on liberal democracy. This view shaped the non-Chinese view of China for a long time. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the growth of a Chinese middle class was supposed to lead to openness; to global capital and its guarantor, the United States; and to the adoption of liberal elements like parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech.

But China under Xi has de-liberalized, and China’s middle class is still not politically strong. Instead of China changing to tap into networks of global capital, U.S., European, and Israeli companies changed the way they operate to retain access to the Chinese market.

Like contemporary reactions to China, earlier reactions to Germany explained its acts by alluding to the past and ended up taking the country’s self-mythologizations seriously. Claims based on “ancient rights,” whether centuries-old maps of Tibet or medieval German crusaders in the Baltic, have more to do with the present needs of power and nationalism than the actual past. But it’s easy to imagine the other as weighted down by a history the shallow West only guesses at: According to LIFE, the German General Staff “thinks in terms of decades, not just battles.” A recent analysis of Chinese strategy claimed it breaks international treaties because Chinese people see time as “fluid and malleable, where past, present, and future are all interconnected.” Similar nonsense predominates through bad China takes.

Last year, international commentators explained East Asian countries’ robust responses to COVID-19 as the result of Confucian culture. East Asia comprises more than six countries and 1.6 billion people, but one article about these countries’ reaction to the epidemic claims their supposed common culture is motivated by Confucian and Buddhist “deep benevolence,” selflessness so profound that in South Korea, people supposedly obey lockdown restrictions without being told. This is just the “yellow peril” in positive drag, the idea that Asian people are a horde without individuality. (Similar things are said about Russia.)

Ironically, given that Kaiser Wilhelm II coined the phrase “yellow peril” and helped spread the idea, Germany in the early 20th century could also appear formidably alien. Like the ubiquitous invocation of philosophers Sun Tzu or Confucius by people who are not Chinese, non-German observers at that time said priest Martin Luther was violently irrational; rejected the Renaissance, civilization, and the West; and led an unbroken chain to German barbarism 400 years later. Or they draw a straight line from the Thirty Years’ War to Adolf Hitler, the most well-known example probably being poet W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”:

“Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

Auden ended up hating the poem. Americans circulated it after 9/11.

Today, the fascination with and terror of Germany is hard to reconstruct. It’s 102 years since the end of World War I, 76 years since the end of World War II, 30 years since German reunification, and 22 years since the euro’s creation. Germany is a prosperous, more-or-less peaceful nation, the United States’ ally, and the center of the European Union. Its current problems seem similar to the United States’: public debate about immigration, minority rights, wrangling over the lingering effects of austerity, a radicalized far right, energy, and global warming. From an aberration, Germany has become the West’s cousin at home.

I don’t know where China is going; if this were 1910 and you asked me where Germany was going, I’m not sure I would be accurate. Descriptions of Germany’s and China’s historical courses or famous religious figures don’t necessarily tell us anything about the countries themselves. The best conclusion we can draw is teleological accounts of development and attempts to root a country’s pathologies in ahistorical interpretations of its culture rather than human nature or more well-informed analysis of its society are a mistake.

Close to 700 men and women, most of them Dalit—those who occupy the lowest level of India’s caste system—attended the ceremony. To unsuspecting onlookers, a crowd of formerly “untouchable,” “lower-caste” Indian men and women chanting, singing, and mourning an octogenarian white American woman might seem odd. But for those in the know, it was only a fraction of the love, gratitude, and respect the Dalit community in India and the United States felt for their beloved “Gail.”

Chants of “Long Live Comrade Gail” and “Red Salute to Gail Omvedt” (a popular leftist slogan in India) permeated the air as her funeral procession slowly made its way from the modest single-story home she shared with her husband, activist and human rights advocate Bharat Patankar, to the open field where her last rites were conducted. The ceremony took place in accordance with Buddhist rites and rituals, the practice Omvedt had adopted in the 1970s soon after she moved to India from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gail Omvedt, an 80-year-old Minneapolis-born sociologist, died in Kasegaon, a sleepy village town in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in late August.

Chants of “Long Live Comrade Gail” and “Red Salute to Gail Omvedt” (a popular leftist slogan in India) permeated the air as her funeral procession slowly made its way from the modest single-story home she shared with her husband, activist and human rights advocate Bharat Patankar, to the open field where her last rites were conducted. The ceremony took place in accordance with Buddhist rites and rituals, the practice Omvedt had adopted in the 1970s soon after she moved to India from the University of California, Berkeley.

Close to 700 men and women, most of them Dalit—those who occupy the lowest level of India’s caste system—attended the ceremony. To unsuspecting onlookers, a crowd of formerly “untouchable,” “lower-caste” Indian men and women chanting, singing, and mourning an octogenarian white American woman might seem odd. But for those in the know, it was only a fraction of the love, gratitude, and respect the Dalit community in India and the United States felt for their beloved “Gail.”

When Omvedt first visited India on a Fulbright scholarship in 1963, she was already organizing student protests against the Vietnam War and had participated in the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States. An academic and cultural interest in India was not particularly uncommon in that era, with the intersecting hippie trail that ran through the country and parts of neighboring Nepal, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s India visit in 1959 and his subsequent interest in its nonviolent struggle for independence against the British, and the heavily publicized trip by the Beatles a few years later.

But Omvedt wasn’t simply interested in the notion of a flagrantly spiritual, tidily sanitized, and mostly Hindu India. She studied at Carleton College, Minnesota, under the tutelage of Eleanor Zelliot, who was among the earliest American academics to study the enforced divisions in Indian society from the marginalized perspective. Omvedt wanted to learn about something that was pointedly and deliberately kept under wraps at that time: caste.

When Omvedt—and Zelliot before her—arrived on the scene, Indian sociology and academia were overrun by nationalist academics who mostly ignored caste and framed an “orientalist, Hindu idea of India as if that was the actual history of India,” in the words of acclaimed professor Surinder S. Jodhka in a recent online tribute to Omvedt.

Although Omvedt’s early work focused on the ongoing women’s rights movement in India, it was mostly her work on Jyotirao “Jyotiba” Phule, a caste revolutionary from the 1800s who along with his wife, Savitribai, established the first formal school for girls in India, and B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit-born founding father of India’s modern anti-caste movement and the architect of the country’s constitution, that gained her notoriety.

Her work brought into sharp focus the intersections of caste hierarchy, class, gender, land ownership and accessibility, and the environment all at the same time—a remarkable achievement for an academic in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the concept of intersectionality was still on the distant margins of mainstream Western academia.

In that era, almost all Indian-born academics were “upper” caste due to deeply entrenched systemic caste discrimination that effectively barred Dalits from higher academia. Most of these academics thus viewed caste as a consensual system rather than one of forced submission and discrimination by birth. As a result, that view erroneously and dangerously came to be the generally accepted understanding of India around the world: a country with deep class and gender issues but where caste either didn’t exist or didn’t make much of a difference.

Omvedt challenged these caste-based and hierarchal ideas—not just by directly and incisively calling them out in her work but also by bringing her organizational skills to the front lines of several peasant, feminist, anti-caste, trade union, and worker struggles in India.

In the 1980s, along with her husband, who was from a “lower-caste” peasant family, and her mother-in-law, Indian independence revolutionary Indumati Patankar, Omvedt co-founded Shramik Mukti Dal, a sociopolitical organization that supported displaced Indigenous people and farmers and addressed caste, environmental, water, and drought issues.

Although she traveled nationally and internationally for work, Omvedt and Patankar decided to make the village town of Kasegaon their home so they could be close to those whose movements they helped organize and ensure their daughter, Prachi Patankar, now a well-known anti-caste activist based in the United States, received a primary education in the Marathi language and fully understood the specific kind of graded inequality Dalits suffered.

“Gail did not sit in an ivory tower,” said Shailaja Paik, an associate professor of history, women’s gender studies, and sexuality at the University of Cincinnati and one of the handful of Dalit academics in the United States. “She spent time learning from the lives and experiences of the people she was writing about. When I was a student, there were few people writing about Indian history with a Dalit perspective. Her work is influential and revolutionary.”

Omvedt’s decades-long engagement and friendships with Dalits, other “lower-caste” Indians, Adivasis (the self-chosen name for Indian Indigenous people), working-class people, and farmers combined with her razor-sharp acumen and sparkling moral clarity made her a prominent and effective champion of Dalit and Adivasi rights. Yet she made a point to center the leadership on those whose rights she was advocating for, a rarity in the celebrity-studded activist milieu of 1980s and 1990s India.

In the early 2000s, for instance, Omvedt famously wrote an open letter to Booker award-winning author Arundhati Roy, questioning Roy’s criticism of the so-called “big dams”—a group of hydroelectricity and irrigation dams, which at the time were commissioned to be built on India’s Narmada River and threatened to displace a population of the local Adivasi people—as part of Roy’s advocacy work with the Narmada Bachao Andolan activist movement in India.

“Gail did not sit in an ivory tower,” said Shailaja Paik, associate professor at the University of Cincinnati. “She spent time learning from the lives and experiences of the people she was writing about.”

Citing what was an extremely unpopular opinion at the time, Omvedt questioned why there was no Adivasi leadership spearheading the movement, given they were the ones being displaced, and argued the farmers in those areas needed the dams for agriculture.

Her fierce advocacy for Dalits and other marginalized people led Omvedt to be sidelined in Indian academia for decades. Chinnaiah Jangam, an associate professor in history at Canada’s Carleton University, noted that as recently as the 1990s, anti-caste literature by Omvedt and others was only accessible through underground Dalit networks in India, and as a Dalit student, he’d struggled to find material that could validate his lived experience of caste oppression.

For many Dalit academics, students, and writers, Omvedt’s radical transparency and anti-caste perspective became something of a refuge in the otherwise invalidating, oppressive, and silence-inducing culture of Indian academia.

To this day, weeks after her death, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube continue to brim with stories about her unassuming presence and approachable manner—and how she rarely pulled rank or talked down to the multitude of Dalit, Adivasi, and other “lower-caste” and marginalized students who crammed her lecture halls and seminar rooms for decades.

Fluent in English, Hindi, and Marathi, Omvedt’s whiteness almost paled next her anti-caste crusade for justice as many “untouchable” Dalits, often humiliated and discriminated by our fellow brown-skinned “upper-caste” Indians, can attest—myself included. While writing my book Coming Out as Dalit, Omvedt’s work sustained and nourished my own vision, giving me the unflinching courage to stand by my ideas and the academic support to draw from my personal history of oppression for a nonfiction account.

Since launching her canonical theory on anti-caste movements in India in the 1960s, it seems the world has finally caught up with the ideas Omvedt has been advocating for decades. As Hindu fundamentalist forces threaten to overtake the civil discourse not just in India but also here in the United States, attempting to intimidate Dalit and radical scholars into silence, Omvedt’s work is more relevant than ever and deserves the global recognition long denied to her.

While Dalits around the world continue to mourn her absence, Omvedt left us with Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals, her last book, which contains a vision of an egalitarian, anti-caste utopia conceived of by 15th- and 19th-century Dalit writers. In the spirit of holding on to hope, as difficult as that might currently seem, that vision is something none of us can stop striving for.