Chapter 19 Module 3

1. What accounts for the massive peasant rebellions of 19thcentury China?

There were many things accounted for the massive peasant rebellions in China during the nineteenth century. One of the things that accounted for massive peasant rebellions during the nineteenth century was the growing population in China. “Its robust economy and American food crops had enabled substantial population growth from about 100 million people in 1685 to some 430 million in 1853” (901). The state was increasingly unable to effectively perform its many functions, such as tax collections, flood control, social warfare, and public security. The first half of the nineteenth-century European military pressure and economic penetration which disrupted internal trade routes created substantial unemployment and raised peasant taxes. At the beginning of the late eighteenth century, such rebellions drew on a variety of peasant grievances and found leadership in charismatic figures proclaiming a millenarian religious message. The culmination of China’s internal crisis which laid in the  Taiping Uprising, which set much of the country aflame between 1850 and 1864. Among the most revolutionary dimensions of the Taiping Uprising was the posture toward women and gender roles. During the uprising, the Hakka women who never fought would now have the chance to fight as soldiers in their own regiments.

2. How did Western pressures stimulate change in China during the nineteenth century?

There was a huge shift of global power in the nineteenth century between China and Europe, most dramatically in the famous Opium Wars. “Opium had been long been used on a small scale as a drinkable medicine; it was regarded as a magical cure for dysentery and described by one poet as “fit for Buddha” (904).  Opium started to become a serious problem in the late eighteenth century, when the British began to use opium, grown and processed in India, to cover their persistent trade imbalance with China. Other countries wanted to sell opium to make some profit. “By the 1830s, British, American, and other Western merchants had found an enormous, growing, and very profitable market for this highly addictive drug” (905). The Chinese authorities recognized the problem of this drug. Opium importation was illegal, it had to be smuggled into China, which broke the Chinese law.  Illegal marketers used a massive outflow of silver for the opium. “China found itself with many millions of addicts- men and women, court officials, students preparing for exams, soldiers going into combat, and common laborers seeking to overcome the pain and drudgery of their work. The Britsh were offended by the seizure of their property and emboldened by their new military power, sent a large naval expedition to China. 

5. What lay behind the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the 19thcentury?

In 1750 the Ottoman Power was the central political fixture of a widespread Islamic World. The Ottoman Empire started to shrink at the hands of stronger countries. “The Ottoman Empire’s own domains shrank considerably at the hand of Russia, British, Austrian, and the French aggression” (911).  In China, the central Ottoman state had weakened, as they were struggling to raise revenue, as provincial authorities and local warlords gained greater power. “ Competition from cheap European manufactured goods hit Ottoman artisans hard and led to urban riots protesting foreign imports” (911).  There were some agreements better known as capitulations, between European countries and the Ottoman Empire granted Westerners exemptions from the Ottoman Law and taxation.

“These agreements facilitated European penetration of the Ottoman economy and became widely resented” (911). This made the Ottoman Empire change the position of the empire related to Europe. The Ottoman Empire heavily depended on foreign loans to finance the efforts for economic development. The Ottoman struggled to pay the interest on those debts led to foreign control. “By 1881, its inability to pay the interest on those debts led to foreign control of much of its revenue-generating system, while a similar situation in Egypt led to its outright occupation by the British” (911)