A People's History of the World is a superb contemporary popular account of global history from the point of view of modern Marxist histriography. One of the most excellent features of this book is that it is not Eurocentric at all, unlike most other Western accounts of world history. Indeed, it seems to hold the Chinese civilisation in the highest regard.

Here are some good excerpts from this brilliant book, I would recommend this great book to everyone here.


pg. 221

China's glorious sunset

China was already recovering from its crisis of the 14th century by the early part of the 15th. One proof was a series of epic voyages by naval expeditions. Fleets of large ships carrying more than 20,000 people sailed to the west coast of India, Aden and on to east Africa, on one occasion making the 6000 mile journey non-stop. This was three quarters of a century before Spanish or Portuguese fleets attempted comparable journeys.

Gernet calls the 16th century "the beginning of a new age". In agriculture, he notes, there were new machines for working the soil, for irrigation, sowing seed and the treatment of products along with new methods of improving the soil and the selection of new crop strains. In industry, there was the introduction of the silk loom with three or four shuttle-winders, along with improvements in cotton looms, the development of printing from wood blocks in three or four colours and the invention of a copper-lead alloy for casting moveable character, and new ways of manufacturing white and icing sugars. "Numerous works of a scientific or technical character were published" in the first part of the 17th century, dealing with questions as diverse as agricultural techniques, weaving, ceramics, iron and steel, river transport, armaments, inks and papers, and hydraulic devices. This was certainly not a period of technological stagnation. Nor was it one in which intellectuals simply parroted certainties from the past. Gernet tells of thinkers such as the self educated former salt worker Wang Ken, who questioned the established view of historical figures, challenged the hypocrisies of the age and traditional morality, and defended "lower classes, women, ethnic minorities". Gernet continues:

The end of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century were marked by the remarkable development of the theatre, the short story and the novel, and by the upsurge of a semi-learned, semi-popular culture...of an urban middle class eager for reading matter and entertainment. Never had the book industry been so prosperous or its products of such good quality.

There was a "rapid increase in the number of cheap publications", with literature "written in a language much closer to the spoken dialects than to classical Chinese...addressed to an urban public...not well educated, but free of the intellectual constraints indicated by a classical training." If Gernet's account is correct, then China was undergoing a technical and intellectual renaissance at more or less the same time as Europe.

There were some similar social changes. The state increasingly commuted the old labour services of peasants and artisans into money taxes. The commercialisation of agriculture led to the production of industrial crops like cotton, dyes, vegetable oils and tobacco. Poorer peasants, driven from the land by landlords, sought a livelihood in other ways - taking up handicraft trades, emigrating to the mining areas, seeking work in the towns. Trading and craft enterprises flourished, especially in the coastal regions of the south and east. As in Europe, most production was still in artisan workshops. But there were occasional examples of something close to full-scale industrial capitalism. Small enterprises grew into big enterprises, some of which employed several hundred workers. Peasant women took jobs at Sungchiang, south west of Shanghai, in the cotton mills. At the end of the 16th century there were 50,000 workers in 30 paper factories in Kiangsi. Some Chinese industries began producing for a worldwide, rather than a merely local, market. Silk and ceramics were exported in bulk to Japan. It was not long before "Chinese silks were being worn in the streets of Kyoto and Lima, Chinese cottons being sold in Filipino and Mexican markets and Chinese porcelain being used in fashionable homes from Sakai to London".

It was a period of economic growth despite continued poverty among the lower classes. After falling by almost half to around 70 million in the 14th century, the population rose to an estimated 130 million in the late 16th century and to as high as 170 million by the 1650s. Then the empire ran into a devastating crisis similar in many ways to those of the 4th century and the 14th century - as well as to that occurring simultaneously in much of 17th century Europe. There were a succession of epidemics, floods, droughts and other disasters. Famines devastated whole regions. The population stopped growing and even declined in some regions. Once-flourishing industries shut down. By the 1640s reports from northern Chekiang (the hinterland of Shanghai) spoke of "mass starvation, hordes of beggars, infanticide and cannibalism".

By 1642 the great city of Soochow [on the lower Yangtze] was in visible decline, with many homes vacant and falling into ruin, while the once-rich countryside had become a no man's land which only armed men dared enter.

Historians often explain this crisis, like the earlier ones, in terms of overpopulation or harvest failures due to global changes in climate. But "rice was available in the Yangtze delta even during the terrible "famines" that plagued the country during the early 1640s...People simply lacked sufficient funds to pay for it".

The crises were, in fact, rooted in the organisation of Chinese society. The state and the buraucratic class which staffed it had encouraged economic expansion in the aftermath of the crisis of the 14th century. But they soon began to fear some of the side-effects, particularly the growing influence of merchants. There was a sudden end to the great naval voyages to India and Africa in 1433 (so ensuring it was ships from Europe which 'discovered' China, rather than the other way round). "The major concern of the Ming empire was not to allow coastal trade to disturb the social life of its agrarian society". Its rulers could not stop all overseas trade. What today would be called a "black economy" grew up in coastal regions, and there were bitter armed clashes with "pirates" controlling such areas. But the state measures cramped the development of the new forms of production.

Meanwhile, the ever-growing unproductive expenditure of the state was an enormous drain on the economy. Under emperor Wanli, for instance, there were 45 princes of the first rank, each receiving incomes equal to 600 tons of grain a year, and 23,000 nobles of lesser rank. More than half the tax revenues of the provinces of Shansi and Honan went on paying these allowances. A war with Japan for control of Korea "completely exhausted the treasury".

Acute hardship led to social discontent. Almost every year between 1596 and 1626 saw urban riots by "workmen" in the most economically developed parts of the country. In 1603 the miners from private mines marched on Beijing, the 1620s saw rebellions by the non-Chinese peoples in the south west, and there were major peasant rebellions in the north of the country in the 1630s. A sort of opposition also emerged at the top of society among intellectuals and former mandarins which was crushed by a secret police network.

Political collapse followed in 1644. The last Ming emperor strangled himself as a former shepherd leader of a peasant army proclaimed a new dynasty. A month later Manchu invaders from the north took Beijing.

The economic and political crisis bore many similarities to that in Europe in the same period. But there was a difference. The merchant and artisan classes did not begin to pose an alternative of their own to the old order. They did not even do what the Calvinist merchants and burghers in France did when they exerted some influence on the dissident wing of the aristocracy. They certainly did not remould the whole of society in their own image, as the merchant bourgeoisie of the northern Netherlands and the "middling classes" in England did. As in the previous great crises in Chinese society, the trading and artisan classes were too dependent on the state bureaucracy to provide an alternative.

The immediate chaos lasted only a few years. The Manchus had long before absorbed many aspects of the Chinese civilisation, and by restoring internal peace and stability to the imperial finances they provided a framework for economic recovery - for a period. There was further agricultural advance as crops from the Americas made their full impact and industrial crops expanded. The peasant was "in general much better and happier than his equivalent in the France of Louis XV", with the better-off peasants even able to pay for their children to receive a formal education. There was a resumption of trade and craft production until it outstripped anything before. There were 200,000 full time textile workers in the region south west of Shanghai, and tens of thousands of porcelain craftsmen turned out products for the court and for export to as far away as Europe. Tea output grew rapidly, with the leaves processed in workshops employing hundreds of wage workers and exported by sea. One estimate suggests half the silver carried from Latin America to Europe between 1571 and 1821 ended up paying for goods from China. The population grew by leaps and bounds as people saw hope for the future, perhaps reaching 260 million in 1812. The country was "the richest and biggest state in the world".

The sheer strength of the empire bred complacency in its ruling circles, and complacency led to intellectual stagnation. The early Manchu years saw a flourishing of intellectual inquiry, a wave of "free thought and a radical criticism and questioning of the institutions and intellectual foundations of the authoritarian empire". Art, literature, philosophy and history all seem to have been marked by a spirit of vitality.

Accounts of the period remind one of the "Enlightenment" in Europe. But the critical spirit subsided as the "educated classes rallied to the new regime". There was a decline in popular literature for the urban middle classes, and a ban on anything that might be construed as mildly critical of the regime. In the years 1774-89 more than 10,000 works were prohibited and 2,320 destroyed. Dissident authors and their relatives faced exile, forced labour, confiscation of property and even execution. Intellectuals could flourish, but only if they avoided dealing with real issues. The literature which thrived was "written in a classical style more difficult to access, full of literary reminiscences and allusions...The novel became subtly ironical, psychological...or erudite".

The basic causes of the crisis of the 17th century were never dealt with, and the old symptoms soon reappeared - immense expenditures on the imperial court, the spread of corruption through the administration, costly wars on the borders, increased oppression of the peasants by local administrators and tax collectors, a failure to maintain the dykes and regulate water courses, and recurrent and sometimes catastrophic floods. A new wave of peasant rebellions began with the rising of the "White Lotus" in 1795, and one of the greatest revolts in Chinese history was to follow within half a century.

... ...

Mogul India

Mogul India was a very different society to China. It did not have the great canal and irrigation systems, a centralised bureaucracy inculcated with literary traditions almost 2000 years old, a class of large landowners, or a peasantry that bought as well as sold things in local markets.

A succession of Islamic rulers had overrun much of northern India from the 13th century, imposing centralised structures on the local peasant economies of the Indian Middle Ages. The Mogul emperors developed the system, ruling through a hierarchy of officials who were given the right to collect land taxes in specific areas with which they had to maintain the cavalry essential for the military functioning of the state. They were not landowners, although they grew rich from the exploitation of the peasantry. There was also another landed class - the zamindars - in each locality. They were often upper caste Hindus from the pre-Mogul exploiting classes, who helped to collect the taxes and took a share for themselves.

The great mass of rural people continued to live in virtually self sufficient villages. Hereditary groups of peasants would produce food for hereditary groups of village smiths, carpenters, weavers and barbars in a self contained division of labour that did not involve cash payments. All the elements of the medieval caste system remained intact.

But the peasants did need cash for their taxes, and had to sell between a third and a half of their crops to get it. Those who failed to pay, as one observer recorded in the 1620s, were "carried off, attached to heavy chains, to various markets and fairs" to be sold as slaves, "with their poor, unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children in their arms, all crying and lamenting their plight".

The great bulk of the surplus extracted from the peasants in this way went to the imperial court, the state bureaucracy and its armies. As Irfan Habib explains, the state "served not merely as the protective arm of the exploiting class, but was itself the principle instrument of exploitation". Few of these revenues ever returned to the villages. The state used them in the cities and towns of the empire.

The result was a growth of trade and urban craft production, and a system that was far from economically static. The Mogul period witnessed "the achievement of an unprecendented level of industrial and commercial prosperity, reflected in general urbanisational growth". There was an "intensification, expansion and multiplication of crafts", and of both internal and international trade. "There were as many as 120 big cities", and "great concentrations of population, production and consumption [in] Lahore, Delhi and Agra, and to a lesser extent in Lucknow, Benares and Allahabad". Contemporary observers regarded Lahore "as the greatest city in the east". One European visitor estimated the population of Agra to be 650,000, and Delhi was said to be as big as Europe's biggest city, Paris.

The biggest industry, cotton textiles, was exporting products to Europe by the 17th century: "As many as 32 urban centres manufactured cotton in large quantities"; "no city, town or village seems to have been devoid of these industries"; and "almost every house in the villages used to have its spinning wheel". At the same time, "The organisation of commercial credit, insurance and rudimentary deposit banking reminds us of conditions in Renaissance Europe".

But one factor was missing to make this economic advance lasting - there was no feedback into the villages of the industrial advance in the towns. "So much is wrung from the peasants", wrote one contemporary witness, "that even dry bread is scarcely left to fill their stomachs". They simply could not afford to buy improved tools. "There is no evidence that the villages depended in any way on urban industry", and so the growth of the city trades was accompanied by stagnation and impoverishment of the villages. In general, the city "was not a city that produced commodities for the use of society, rather one that devastated the countryside while eating up local produce".

The long term effect was to ruin the peasant productive base of the empire. At the same time as Shah Jahan was using the tax revenues to glorify Lahore, Delhi and Agra and build the Taj Mahal, an observer reported that "the land was being laid waste through bribery and revenue farming, as a result of which the peasantry was being robbed and plundered". Peasants began to flee from the land. Habib tells how, "famines initiated wholesale movements of population...but it was a man-made system which, more than any other factor, lay at the root of the peasant mobility".

The cities grew partly because landless labourers flooded into them looking for employment. But this could not cure the debilitating effect of over-taxation on the countryside. Just as the empire seemed at its most magnificent it entered into a decline that was to prove terminal.

The effects became apparent during the reign of Shah Jahan's son (and jailer) Aurangzeb. Many histories of the Moguls contrast Aurangzeb's Islamic fanaticism, anti-Hindu actions and endless wars with the apparently enlightened rule of Akbar a century earlier, based as it was on religious tolerance and controls on the rapaciousness of local officials. No doubt these differences owed something to the personalities of the two emperors. But they also corresponded to two periods - one in which the empire could still expand without damaging its agrarian base and one in which that was no longer possible.

Eventually urban industry and the towns began to suffer from the agricultural decline - except, perhaps, in Bengal. In Agra after 1712 there was "talk only of the present deserted state of the city and the glory that existed before".

At first, few peasants dared challenge Mogul power. "The people endure patiently, professing that they would not desire anything better", a European traveller reported in the 1620s. Discontent at this time found expression in the rise of new religiouis sects. They used vernacular dialects rather than the dead language Sanskrit, and their prophets and preachers came mainly from the lower classes - including a weaver, a cotton carder, a slave, and the grain merchant Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism. The sects challenged the traditional Brahman-based religious ideology and stood for "an uncompromising monotheism, the abandonment of ritualistic forms of worship, the denial of caste barriers and communal differences". But they also shied away from the language of outright rebellion. They taught "humility and resignation", not "militancy or physical struggle".

This changed as the conditions of their followers worsened: "The sects could not always remain within the old mystic shell...They provided the inspiration for two of the most powerful revolts against the Moguls, those of the Satnams and the Sikhs". By the end of Aurangzeb's reign, "half-crushed Sikh insurgents" were already a problem in the hinterland of Lahore. There was a revolt of the Jat peasant caste in the region between Agra and Delhi (one writer boasted that the suppression of a revolt involved the slaughter "of 10,000 of those human-looking beasts"), a great Sikh rebellion in 1709, and a revolt of the Marathas, "which was the greatest single force responsible for the downfall of the empire".

The fighting strength of the rebellions was provided by peasant bitterness. But the leadership usually came from zamindar or other local exploiting classes who resented the lion's share of the surplus going to the Mogul ruling class. "Risings of the oppressed" merged with "the war between two oppressing classes".

The merchants and artisans did not play a central role in the revolts. They relied on the luxury markets of the Mogul rulers and lacked the network of local markets which allowed the urban classes in parts of Europe to influence the peasantry. The old society was in crisis, but the "bourgeoisie" was not ready to play an independent role in fighting to transform it. This left zamindar leaders with a free hand to exploit the revolt for their own ends - ones which could not carry society forward.

As Irfan Habib concludes:

Thus was the Mogul Empire destroyed. No new order was, or could be, created from the force ranged against it... The gates were open to endless rapine, anarchy and foreign conquest. But the Mogul Empire had been its own gravedigger.

The way was open for armies from western Europe to begin empire-building of their own, and to have the backing of sectors of the Indian merchant bourgeoisie when they did so.

... ...

pg. 355, A People's History of the World:

The conquest of the East

The splendours of the Orient still had an allure for west Europeans in 1776, when Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations. Textiles, porcelain and tea from India and China were sought after in the west, and intellectuals like Voltaire treated the civilisations of the East as at least on par with those of Britain, France and Germany. Adam Smith called China "one of the richest...best cultivated, most industrious...nations of the world... Though it may stand still, it does not go backwards". A century later the picture was very different. The racist stereotypes applied to the indigenous peoples of Africa and North America were now used for those of India, China and the Middle East. In the intervening period Britain had seized virtually the whole of India as a colony and humiliated China in two wars, France had conquered Algeria, and Russia and Austria-Hungary had torn chunks off the Ottoman Empire. The development of capitalism which had turned the societies of western Europe and the United States upside down now allowed the rulers of those societies to grab control of the rest of the world.

Britain's Indian Empire

India was the first of the great empires to fall into western hands. This did not happen overnight, as a result of straightforward military conquest, nor was it simply the result of technological superiority.

Western commentators in the mid-19th century (including Marx) were mistaken to believe that India was characterised by "age-old" stagnation. Even after the collapse of the Mogul Empire there had been some continuation of economic development with the "growing wealth of merchants, bankers and tax-farmers". But these lived in the shadow of six warring kingdoms, none of which allowed them a decisive say over its policies or even provided real security for their property. This opened the door to the intervention of the British East India Company, with its troops and its arms. Many merchants saw it as able to protect their interests in a way Indian rulers would not.

At the beginning of the 18th century the Company had still been a marginal force in the sub-continent. It relied on concessions from Indian rulers for its trading posts along the coast. But over time it established increasingly strong ties with the Indian merchants who sold it textiles and other goods from the interior. Then in the 1750s a Company official, Robert Clive, played one claimant to power in Bengal off against a rival, defeated a French force and gained control of the province - which was by far the wealthiest part of the old Mogul Empire. The Company collected the taxes and ran the government administration, while an Indian nawab continued to hold the formal regalia of office. Britain had gained the beginnings of a new empire in India just as it was losing its old empire in North America, and had done so at little cost to itself. The Company aimed to cover all its costs from taxing the Indian population and relied on an army made up overwhelmingly of "Sepoy" Indian troops.

The success in Bengal lad to success elsewhere. Other Indian rulers saw the Company as a useful ally, and used it to train their troops and regularise their administrations. Indian merchants welcomed its increased influence, as it bought growing quantities of textiles from them and helped guarantee their property against inroads by Indian rulers. The Company further cemented its power by creating a new class of large-scale landowners out of sections of the old zamindars.

It was not difficult for the British to consolidate their position further, when necessary, by dispensing with obdurate local rulers and establishing direct Company rule.

By 1850 a policy of conquering some rulers and buying off others had extended the area of British domination throughout the whole sub-continent. The Marathas were conquered in 1818, Sind in 1843, the Sikhs in 1849 and Oudh in 1856. British ministers boasted that the Company's approach was modelled on the Roman principle of divide et impera - divide and rule. Using bribery in some instances and violence in others, it played ruler off against ruler, kingdom against kingdom, privileged class against privileged class, caste against caste, and religion against religion, finding local allies wherever it moved. This enabled it to conquer an empire of 200 million people with "a native army of 200,000 men, officered by Englishmen and ... kept in check by an English army numbering only 40,000".

Enormous wealth flowed to the Company's agents. Clive left India with £234,000 in loot - equivalent to many millions today - and governor-general Warren Hastings was notorious for taking huge bribes. This wealth was created by the mass of peasants. The cultivators of Bengal and Bihar paid out £2 million a year in taxes. The Company called its officials "collectors" and applied the same methods of extortion as the Moguls had done, but more efficiently and with more devastating consequences.

This ensured that the poverty which had afflicted the mass of people in the late Mogul period now grew worse. Crop failures in 1769 were followed by famines and epidemics which cost up to ten million lives. An area which had stunned Europeans with its wealth only half a century earlier was now on its way to becoming one of the poorest in the world.

None of this worried the nawabs, maharajahs, merchants or zamindars who supped from the company's table. They grew fat as it grew fat. But they soon discovered the hard way that their partnership with the British was not one of equals. The Company which raised up local rulers could also throw them down without a second thought.

Control of the Company lay in Britain, however much Indian merchants might benefit from its trading connections. This was shown dramatically in the first decades of the 19th century. The mechanisation of the Lancashire cotton mills suddenly enabled them to produce cloth more cheaply than India's handicraft industry. Instead of India's products playing a central role in British markets, British cloth took over India's markets, destroying much of the Indian textile industry, devastating the lives of millions of textile workers, and damaging the profits of the Indian merchants. Without a government of their own, they had no means to protect their interests as the country underwent de-industrialisation and British capitalists displaced them from areas of profit making like shipbuilding and banking. Meanwhile the thin, highly privileged stratum of British officials became more arrogant, more bullying, more condescending, more rapacious and more racist.

They reaped the consequences of their behaviour in 1857. The Company's Sepoy Indian troops turned on their officers after they ignored the troops' religious convictions, ordering them to use cartridges greased with beef fat (anathema to Hindus) and pork fat (anathema to Muslims). The issue became a focus for the bitterness felt across India at the behaviour of white sahibs. Within weeks mutineers had seized control of a huge swathe of northern India, killing those British officers and officials they could lay their hands on and besieging the remainder in a few isolated fortified posts. Hindus and Sikhs forgot any animosity towards Muslims, installing an heir of the Moguls as emperor in the historic capital of Delhi.

The rising was eventually crushed. A panicking government rushed British troops to the sub-continent, and officers succeeded in persuading Indian soldiers in Madras and Bombay to put down the mutineers in the north. The most savage measures were then used to deter any future threat of mutiny.

However, the government saw that repression alone could not pacify India. There had to be some control over the rapacity of British business if it was not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, and more emphasis had to be put on divide and rule - institutionalising communal and religious divisions even if it meat dropping attempts to make Indian social behaviour accord with bourgeois norms. Direct rule from Britain replaced that of the East India Company, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, and every effort was made to bind local Indian rulers and landowners into the imperial system.

But if the administration was regularised, the impoverishment of the mass of people continued. The proportion of the population dependent upon agriculture for a living rose from 50% to 75%. While 25% of the tax revenues went on paying for the army to keep the Indians down, education, public health and agriculture got a bare 1% each. Famines swept the country. Over a million people died in the 1860s, three and half million in the 1870s, and as many as ten million in the 1890s.

Meanwhile there were secure careers, paid for out of the taxes on the peasants, for the sons of the British upper middle class - in the senior ranks of the Indian army and newly formed civil service. They brought over their wives and created the snob-ridden, racist enclaves described in Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills, Forster's Passage to India, Orwell's Burmese Days and Paul Scott's Jewel in the Crown.

The British sahibs despised those they called "natives". But they still relied on certain of them to control the mass of the population. The old rajahs or maharajahs remained in palaces, rebuilt in ever more luxurious fashion, along with their numerous wives, servants, horses, elephants and hunting dogs - sometimes even nominally ruling (most famously in Hyderabad), but in practice getting their orders from British "advisers". Dotted across the countryside of the north, the zamindars lived in a lesser luxury of their own, dominating the peasantry and reliant on the British, even if they occasionally moaned about their own status. Then there were the village brahmins and head-men who would help the British collect their taxes, and the zamindars their rents. All of them manipulated old caste (or religious) divisions to gain leverage for themselves in negotiations with those above them and to aid their exploitation of those below - so that by the end of the 19th century caste ties were generally more systematised than at the beginning. At the same time a new middle class was emerging, whose members hoped for advance as lawyers, clerks or civil servants within the structures of British rule, but found their hopes continually frustrated by racial barriers.

... ...

The subjection of China

China avoided being absorbed like India into a European empire. Yet the fate of the mass of its people was hardly more enviable.

The wealth of China had excited the greed of western merchants from the time of Marco Polo in the 13th century. But they faced a problem. While China produced many things Europeans wanted, Europe did not produce much the Chinese wanted. The British East India Company set out to rectify this by turning wide areas of the newly conquered lands in India over to the cultivation of a product that creates its own demand - opium. By 1810 it was selling 325,000 kilos of the drug a year through Canton, and soon turned China's centuries old trade surplus into a deficit. When Chinese officials tried to halt the flow of opium, Britain went to war in 1839 for the right to create addiction.

Chinese officialdom ruled over an empire older and more populous than any in the world. The country had only ever been conquered by nomad hordes from the north. Its rulers expected to be able to defeat a seaborne challenge from a country more than 7000 miles away easily. They did not realise that economic developments at the other end of Eurasia - developments which owed an enormous debt to Chinese innovation in centuries past - had given rise to a country more powerful than anyone had ever imagined.

A memo to the emperor from a leading official predicted easy victory:

The English barbarians are an insignificant and detestable race, trusting to their strong ships and big guns; the immense distances they have traversed will render the arrival of seasonable supplies impossible, and their soldiers, after a single defeat...will become dispirited and lost.

But after three years of intermittent fighting and negotiations it was the Chinese who acceded to British terms - opening a number of ports to the opium trade, paying an indemnity, ceding the island of Hong Kong and granting extra-territorial rights to British subjects. It was not long before the British decided these concessions were insufficient. They launched a second war in 1857, when 5000 troops laid siege to Canton and forced a further opening up of trade. Still dis-satisfied, they then joined with the French to march 20,000 troops to Beijing and burn the summer palace.

China scholars disagree about the reasons for the easy British victories. Some ascribe them to superior weaponry and warships, a product of industrial advance. Others stress the internal weaknesses of the Manchu state, claiming the difference between the industrial levels of the two countries was not yet enough to explain the victory. But there is no dispute about the outcome. The concessions gained by Britain weakened the Chinese state's ability to control trade and to prevent a growing outflow of the silver it used for currency. There was an escalating debilitation of industry and agriculture alike. The defeats also opened the door to demands for similar concessions from other powers, until European states had extra-territorial enclaves or "concessions" (in effect, mini-colonies) all along the Chinese coast.

The suffering of the peasantry from the decay of the Manchu Empire was intensified by the foreign inroads into it. Conditions became intolerable, especially in the less fertile mountainous areas on the borders between provinces. China's peasants reacted as they had always done in such circumstances in the past. They joined dissident religious sects and rose up against their masters. What followed is normally called the "T'ai-p'ing rebellion". In fact it was a full-blooded revolutionary assault on the power of the state.

The movement began among peasants, labourers and a few impoverished intellectuals in southern China in the mid-1840s. Its leader was Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, a school teacher from a peasant family, who saw himself in a vision as the brother of Jesus, commanded by God to destroy demons on Earth and establish a "Heavenly Kingdom" of "Great Peace" (T'ai-p'ing in Chinese). He preached a doctrine of strict equality between people, equal division of the land, communal ownership of goods and an end to old social distinctions, including those which subjugated women to men. His followers had a sense of purpose and discipline which enabled them to attract ever-greater support and to defeat the armies sent against them. By 1853 the movement, now two million strong, was able to take the former imperial capital of Nanking and run about 40% of the country as a state of its own.

The egalitarian ideals of the movement did not last. The high command was soon behaving like a new imperial court, as Hung began "a life of excess - high living, luxury and many concubines". In the countryside impoverished half-starved peasants still had to pay taxes, even if at a slightly lower rate than before.

The T'ai-p'ing leadership's abandonment of its ideals followed the pattern of previous peasant revolts in China. Illiterate peasants working land dispersed across vast areas were not a compact enough force to exercise control over an army and its leaders. Those leaders soon discovered the material resources simply did not exist to fulfil their visionary ideals of plenty for all. The easy option was to fall into the traditional way of ruling and the traditional privileges which went with it.

But in the last stage of the rebellion there were signs of something new. Effective leadership passed to a cousin of Hung's who began to frame a programme which did imply a break with traditional ways, although not a return to egalitarian ideals. He pushed for the "modernisation" of China's economy through the adoption of western techniques - the opening of banks, building of railways and steamships, promotion of mining, and encouragement of science and technology. This suggests that the T'ai-p'ing rebellion had forces within it which could perhaps have broken with the pattern of past peasant revolts and swept away the social obstacles behind so much of the country's poverty. But these forces had no time to develop. A reorganised imperial army financed by Chinese merchants, provided with modern weapons by Britain and France and assisted by foreign troops under a Major Gordon began to push its way up the Yangtze, Nanking finally fell, with 100,000 dead, in 1864.

Western capitalist states had helped stabilise the old, pre-capitalist order in China, allowing it to survive another 50 years. By doing so, they helped ensure that, while western Europe and North America advanced economically, China went backwards.

... ...

The Eastern Question

The pattern was very similar in the third great Eastern empire, the Ottoman Empire. This vast multinational empire had dominated an enormous area for 400 years - all of north Africa, Egypt and what is now the Sudan, the Arabian peninsula, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, Asia Minor and a huge swathe of Europe, including all the Balkans and, at times, Hungary and Slovakia. It was ruled by Turkish emperors based in Istanbul, and there was a Turkish landowning class in Asia Minor and parts of the Balkans. But much of the empire was run by the upper classes of the conquered non-Turkish peoples - Greeks in much of the Balkans, Arabs in the Middle East, and the descendants of the pre-Ottoman mamluke rulers in Egypt. In Istanbul the various religious groups - orthodox Christians, Syriac Christians, Jews and so on - had structures of self government, subject to overall collaboration with the sultan's rule. Even the army was not exclusively Turkish. Its core was made up of janissaries - originally children from Balkan Christian families taken at a young age to Istanbul, nominally as slaves, and trained as hardened fighters.

The wealth of the empire, like that of all the societies of its time, came overwhelmingly from peasant agriculture. But the Ottomans had long traded both with western Europe (through Russia and Scandinavia via the rivers which fed into the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, and through southern Europe via trade with Venice and Genoa) and India and China (via overland routes such as the "silk road" which ran north of Afghanistan, and through ports on the Red Sea and Persian Gulf). Until the mid-18th century, at least, there were slow but steady advances both in agriculture (the spread of new crops like coffee and cotton) and handicraft industry.

However, by the beginning of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was increasingly under pressure from outside. Napoleon had conquered Egypt until driven out by British troops, and in 1830 the French monarchy seized Algeria in the face of bitter local resistance. Russian forces conquered much of the Caucasus and the Black Sea coast, and set their sights on Istanbul itself. Serbs rebelled against Turkish rule and set up an autonomous kingdom in 1815, and Greeks carved out a state with British and Russian help in the 1820s. The Russian tsars encouraged similar movements elsewhere, posing as the "protectors" of ethnic groups speaking languages similar to their own and belonging to the same Orthodox branch of Christianity.

The Russian advance began to frighten the rulers of western Europe, even when they still relied - as did Austria and Prussia - on Russia's armies to crush revolution in their own lands. Their desire to maintain the Ottoman Empire as a barrier to Russian expansion dominated European diplomacy right up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and became known as "the Eastern Question".

British governments were in the forefront of these efforts. Propping up the Ottoman rulers allowed them not only to check Russian power - which they saw as a threat to their own rule in northern India - but also ensured the Ottomans allowed British goods free access to markets in the Middle East and the Balkans.

The importance of this was shown in Egypt. Power in the country (together with adjacent areas of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) had passed to a "Pasha" of Albanian origin, Mohammed (or Mehmet) Ali, in 1805. He ruled in the name of the Ottoman sultan, but was in effect a ruler in his own right until 1840. He saw that industry was rapidly becoming the key to power and set about using the state monopolies, bought modern textile machinery from Europe and employed skilled Europeans to show Egyptians how to use it. He also had iron and steel furnaces built, seized land from mamluke landowners and produced cash crops for export. The result was that by the 1830s the country had the fifth highest number of cotton spindles per head in the world and up to 70,000 people working in modern factories.

But Mohammed Ali's experiment was brought to a sudden halt in 1840. Britain sent its navy to help the Ottoman Empire reimpose its control over Egypt, shelling Egyptian-controlled ports on the Lebanese coast and landing troops in Syria. Mohammed Ali was forced to cut his army (which had provided a protected market for his textile factories), dismantle his monopolies and accept British-imposed "free trade policies". A cynical Lord Palmerston admitted, "To subjugate Mohammed Ali to Great Britain could be wrong and biased. But we are biased; the vital interests of Europe require that we should be so". The rulers of Europe's most advanced industrial power were quite happy to impose policies which prevented the development of industrial capitalism else-where. Egypt experienced de-industrialisation over the next decades, just as China and India did - and then faced occupation by British troops when Mohammed Ali's successors could not pay their debts.

Egypt had at least attempted to industrialise. There were few such attempts elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, and the unimpeded access to cheap goods to their markets damned these to failure. This also applied to similar attempts in the Iranian Empire, which was sandwiched between the Ottomans, British India and tsarist Russia.

I'm skeptical about this statement. It seems to imply that Europe/The West deliberately made China went backwards ..doesn't seem to be historically right? China's backwardness was mainly due to Qing's late policy and weakness.

Yes, the ruling capitalist class in Europe did deliberately try to hold China back. Such is the nature of capitalism, it is based on the principles of national competition. For a nation-state to get ahead, it needs to make sure other nation-states don't do so.

Your logic is also flawed. According to this logic, if a person bullies another, it is not the bully's fault, but rather the bullied should be blamed for his weakness.

Can you show me which ruling capitalist class in Europe deliberately try to hold China back ? What had they done 'deliberately' to hold China back?

Do you mean the launch of Opium war and the so-called 'unequal treaties' imposed on China (which dragged China backward)?

Read the excerpts I posted.

Thats not the nature of capitalism at all. In fact this view is based on the outdated mercantilist economic theory which assumes that wealth is limited and hence if one country becomes wealthier, it does so at the expense of other countries. Capitalism on the other hand is based on the theory that one can create additional capital and theoretically, an economically strong state will only benefit all other states because it will provide more products for trade. European states didn't try to deliberately hold China back, at least economically, because that would be in conflict with their interest.