Australia and the World Past and Present

Segregation was not a uniquely European institution.

Here I will briefly outline some examples drawn from the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.

China placed restrictions on foreign communities in Guangzhou (Canton) in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Foreign merchants in Qing-era Guangzhou were forced to live in a designated, enclosed district known as the Thirteen Factories area.

They were forbidden from living elsewhere.

Chinese officials closely monitored the activities of residents in the district.

Its purpose was to control foreigners and limit their influence outside the district.

Also in Asia, burakumin (部落民) communities in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868) were forced to live in separate, marginal districts.

They were forbidden from living in mainstream villages or marrying outside their caste.

The Tokugawa authorities saw their separation necessary for preserving the established social hierarchy and the social rules relating to purity.

Tokugawa society was divided into a hierarchy known as the shinōkōshō (士農工商) — warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants. But burakumin sat outside this hierarchy altogether.

They were not on the lowest rung of the social ladder – they had dropped off it completely.

This is reflected in one of the terms used for burakmin. Hinin (非人) literally means “non-person”.

There were a few different terms used when referring to burakumin. One was eta (穢多). This could be translated as “very dirty” or “a lot of filth”.

Whereas the the Thirteen Factories area of China was full of foreign merchants who had travelled there to conduct trade, burakmin were not foreigners. They were ethnically Japanese. They were born in Japan, spoke Japanese and died in Japan.

Cities in the Ottoman Empire had their own Armenian and Jewish quarters from the 15th century to the 19th.

Armenians, Greeks and Jews lived in designated quarters in cities like Istanbul, Bursa and Aleppo.

Communities were not divided ethnically, but based on religious community.

Each community had its own religious and personal law, and was led by its own religious authority.

The authorities of each millet were responsible for maintaining order amongst its own members.

At most times and in most places inside the empire, segregation was not strictly compulsory. It tended to be informal rather than formal.

The Ottoman Empire was not a modern nation-state, so it did not attempt to assimilate everyone inside its territory.

In fact, it was thought that by keeping all of these different communities separate and with high degree of autonomy, conflict and violence might be avoided.

Communities tended not to be walled off.

Rather than being economic deserts, districts were often hives of economic activity.

Segregation was not strictly compulsory. But separation was socially expected and the prevailing system made it hard to do otherwise.

During the late Ottoman period, Greeks in Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans were heavily affected by violence, especially during periods of rebellion or war.

Tensions were heightened during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830). Some estimate that tens of thousands may have been killed at this time. The violence was state-led and occurred amidst a background of rebellion.

The later so-called Pontic Greek Massacres (1914-1923) were even more pronounced, with some estimating that hundreds of thousands were killed in the violence. The backdrop here was World War I and the Turkish War of Independence. This “Greek Genocide” is more widely accepted in Greece than it is in Turkey.

Jews in the Ottoman Empire experienced occasional local violence, but there was no state-led killing in the same vein as that experienced by the Armenians or Greeks.

The Ottoman Empire had welcomed Jewish refugees from Spain in 1492.

Armenians tended to be Christian. Greeks tended to be Orthodox. Within the Ottoman Empire, both were considered as “dhimmi” – non-Muslim minorities, but still entitled to certain protections.

There were few problems in times of peace. But war or rebellion inflamed tensions. The political loyalties of Armenians or Greeks were always under suspicion.

Both groups were concentrated in strategically sensitive areas.

Armenians were concentrated in Eastern Anatolia, near the Russian border.

Greeks were concentrated in the Pontus region in the west.

Both regions were frontier areas and contested.

Conversely, Jews were not concentrated in strategic or frontier areas. They tended to be more urban. They were also more dispersed. They had no history of separatist nationalism within the Ottoman territories. They were viewed as being economically useful and they had no foreign protector.

It was policy of the Ottoman Empire to allow communities to remain culturally distinct. The Empire promoted no common civic or national identity. The authorities promoted religious autonomy over social integration.

So, perhaps in the case of the Ottoman Empire, the toleration of difference my have sown the seeds of fragmentation, which lay dormant until conditions were ripe for them to sprout.

Various peoples were incorporated into the Empire but they remained socially separate.

India had its segregated villages of untouchables or chamar from the pre-modern period right up to today.

These areas constituted separate hamlets, often on the periphery of villages.

They were part of India’s caste system.

The system was often enforced with violence.

The similarities between Japan’s burakumin and India’s chamar communities are striking.

The chamar were a caste of people associated with leather work, butchery and tanning.

Membership to the group was hereditary.

They faced stigma due to the work that they undertook which was seen to be ritually “polluting”.

They faced discrimination and social avoidance.

It is interesting to compare India’s traditional Hindu social order with that of Tokugawa Japan. Both had 4 categories. In the Indian system, priests and scholars were at the top. In the Japanese system, the top tier was occupied by the warrior class – the samurai. Samurai were supposed to have an elevated moral dimension to their service. They were influenced by the cultural traditions of their day, which included the tenants of Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism and Shinto. Some studied religious texts. But they were not priests. And many Samurai were literate, but they were not principally scholars.

The second position in the Indian system belonged to warriors and rulers. We can see that in the Indian hierarchy, religion and scholarship was valued over governance.

Merchants occupied the third rung while in Japan, they were at the bottom of the pile.

Like the burakumin in Japan, the untouchables of India fell outside the regular social order.

Officially, untouchability in India was outlawed in the 1950 Constitution.

Untouchability has weakened over time. Its strength varies from place to place. It is stronger in rural areas than in urban settings. Inter-dining and intermarriage is more restricted than residence.

In Japan, outcast status was abolished in 1871.

While legal discrimination has been removed, communities still face various levels of societal discrimination.

The similarities between the chamar and burakumin are quite remarkable. They are both caste-based and both sit outside a 4-layer social pyramid. But there is a difference when you look at the religious context. In India, the Hindu religion provides the religious context. in Japan, it is Buddhism and Shinto. Of course Buddhism prohibits killing, which helps account for the distaste for burakumin work. Shinto is hyper focused on matters of purity and impurity. Buddhism may have provided a moral or ethical justification for the abhorrence of burakumin work, while Shinto may have provided a ritual justification.

Colonial Latin America had its “reducciones“. These were common from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

There were reducciones in Mexico starting in the 1500s.

There were the reducciones under Francisco de Toledo in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the 1570s.

By the 1600s there were also Jesuit-led missions in Paraguay and Brazil.

Indigenous communities were forcibly relocated into planned settlements, often closer to Spanish or Portuguese estates or mines.

They could be in urban locations or in rural areas.

They were segregated and controlled settlements.

Sometimes inducements were offered in order to get people to move. There was the promise of better jobs, or education for children. Refusal to move was rarely tolerated. If people did resist, individuals could face being refused the Christian sacraments or be denied access to colonial markets.

The resettlement of indigenous populations into reducciones placed scattered communities into more tightly clustered populations. This made tribute collection and labor extraction easier. It also made it easier for missionaries to evangelise.

In the Dutch East Indies, kampung segregation reigned.

Kampung segregation was partly preexisting but it was formalised by the Dutch.

The Dutch used ethnic, occupational, and spatial divisions for control and taxation.

There were the kampung pribumi, or “native quarters”.

There were also separate areas for Chinese, Arabs and Indians.

Movement outside of these areas required permits.

Colonial kampung segregation was multilayered. It was primarily ethnic. But it could also be occupational and sometimes religious or based on social status.

The segregation of different communities is not a uniquely European concept. In Asia, burakumin and chamar villages were physically separated from other areas. Members of these communities faced discrimination. At times these systems were enforced by violence, but these communities didn’t face eradication. Burakimin and chamar communities were not populated by foreigners. They may have been discriminated against, but they were still native.

The Chinese did segregate people in the Thirteen Factories Area, but they were foreign traders rather than indigenous peoples.

It was policy in the Ottoman Empire to segregate different populations. It tended to be based on religion rather than ethnicity. The choice to not promote a single overarching Ottoman identity may have contributed to the balkanisation of the empire. Segregation appears to have set the stage for later violence. The most extreme examples were the violence against the Greeks and Armenians. On the one hand they were dhimmi insiders. On the other hand, their political loyalties were suspected and in this sense they were outsiders. So, they were stuck in this insider-outsider dilemma.

The reducciones of Latin America were inspired by ideas brought from Europe. They were tied to European colonialism. But they found expression in the Western Hemisphere.

Dutch colonisers found segregation already in place when they took over the islands that would make up the Dutch East Indies. But they formalised it and built upon it.