Practice question · Multiple choice
The Taiping civil war killed something in the order of twenty to thirty million people, far more than the Opium Wars. How should that change an account of nineteenth-century China?
Hints
- Compare the orders of magnitude before deciding what the century was mainly about.
- A conflict on that scale reshapes a state’s finances, its armies and its provincial politics.
Show the answer
A. It makes internal crisis, not European intervention, the principal fact of the period
Why
The two are connected, foreign defeat weakened Qing prestige and fiscal capacity, and the settlement relied on new provincial armies that permanently altered the balance between centre and province. But a narrative in which gunboats are the main event misplaces a war that killed on the scale of the First World War.
Practise The Extra-European World
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