The Transformation of the World (120 page)

Some Westerners, especially missionaries, saw in the Taiping the founders of a new Christian China. Others regarded them as an unpredictable force of chaos and took sides with the tarnished Qing dynasty. In China itself the whole movement remained a taboo subject for decades: its survivors would not admit to having supported it, while the victors lived in the (justified) belief that it had been totally eradicated. There is surprisingly little evidence that the Taiping episode, with its radical programs and mass killing, constituted a lasting trauma for the country. The revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen occasionally evoked the memory of the fallen Taiping, but only official Communist histories inserted the experience into a vision of antifeudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Now there is a retreat from such interpretations in China itself. Equally one-sided and outdated is the Cold War mirror image, in which the Taiping appeared as an early “totalitarian” movement.

In a world-historical perspective, four points are of particular interest.

First
. The Taiping Revolution differed from all earlier Chinese popular movements by its Western inspiration. It is true that other elements also entered into its worldview, but it would not have taken the form that it did without the presence of European and American missionaries and their first Chinese converts in southern China. In the middle of the century, China's rulers and cultural elite knew next to nothing about Christianity. The ideas of the Taiping were therefore entirely alien to them and its peculiar amalgam of popular Chinese religion, Confucianism, and evangelical Protestantism quite incomprehensible. At the same time, the economic crisis in southwestern China, which brought the movement much of its support, was partly a result of the country's gradual opening to uncontrolled foreign trade in the years since 1842. Opium, together with the pressure of imports, led to social distortions that helped to bring about a revolutionary situation. The Taiping Revolution was among other things, but by no means exclusively, a phenomenon of globalization.

Second
. Parallels between the Taiping and religious revivalist movements in other parts of the world are unmistakable. What was unique were the early militarization and military success of the movement and its far-from-otherworldly goal of overthrowing the existing political order. The Taiping was a charismatic movement but not a messianic sect awaiting salvation at the end of time. In keeping with Chinese tradition, it was much more concerned with life in this world.

Third
. There were few programmatic elements in common between the Taiping and the European revolutions. The idea that an unsuccessful dynasty might forfeit its heavenly mandate did not originate in the West but came down from ancient Chinese political thought. At that time no one in China thought in terms of human and civil rights, the defense of private property, popular sovereignty, the separation of powers, or constitutions. But some elements within the Taiping movement—especially Hong Reng'an, a kind of chancellor of the Taiping Tianguo and a cousin of Hong Xiuquan—devised plans for the infrastructural and economic modernization of China that bore the clear mark of experiences in British-ruled Hong Kong and pointed far ahead into the future. Hong Reng'an could imagine a Christian China as an integrated part of the world community, and in this respect he was far in advance of most official representatives of the Chinese state, who still clung to the vision of an intrinsically superior Middle Kingdom. Hong already sought to introduce railroads, steamships, a postal system, patenting, and Western-style banking and insurance. And, not wanting the state alone to be responsible for these, he recommended the participation of private individuals (“prosperous people with an interest in public affairs”).
¹³⁰
This program was not unsuited to the needs of China. Like the European revolutions, it transgressed the mental boundaries of the ancien régime.

Fourth
. The repression of the Taiping did not precipitate anything on the scale of the refugee flow from Europe after 1848–49. Where would so many Chinese have gone? But there were traces of some who made it to Southeast Asia, in
particular, and among those who went abroad via the incipient coolie trade there must have been former revolutionaries who no longer felt safe in their homeland. Yet, the Taiping Revolution was not exported, and those who had fought for it did not take their goals with them into other milieux. In vain are we looking for a Chinese Carl Schurz.

The Great Rebellion in India

In spring 1857, Qing troops on several fronts were in full-scale retreat from the Taiping armies. On the other side of the Pacific, 1857 was the year of major agenda setting in the United States. A cumulative sharpening of conflicts had carried the North and the South to a point of no return beyond which a violent resolution seemed increasingly unavoidable. Some clear-sighted observers already suspected that a civil war lay around the corner, and four years later they would be proved right.
¹³¹
Not only was the world's oldest monarchy threatened with collapse; the largest of all republics, in many respects the world's most progressive polity, stood on the brink of an existential crisis. The largest state in Eurasia was also going through a period of special uncertainty. The rulers of Russia had just been plunged into deep self-doubt by the defeat in the Crimea. Tsar Alexander II and his advisers spent 1857 developing plans for the emancipation of the serfs, which by now seemed impossible to avoid.
¹³²
No great peasant rising seemed imminent, but reforms were necessary to head one off.

Meanwhile, India showed what might befall an empire when its periphery rebelled. For precisely one century the British had been extending their power over the Subcontinent in one campaign after another, with no significant setbacks. Thinking their position assured, they came to believe not only that their Indian subjects accepted them as rulers but also that they were acting as benefactors by bringing them a superior civilization. The reality, and the British appreciation of it, changed within a few weeks. In July 1857 British rule collapsed in large parts of northern India, and pessimists thought it at least questionable whether the largest colony in the world could be kept within the empire.

The British spoke and speak of the Indian Mutiny. Horrific images such as the massacre at Kanpur (Cawnpore), when several hundred European and Anglo-Indian women and children were killed in July 1857, are still part of the mythology of imperial remembrance.
¹³³
In India, where people are more likely to remember the atrocities committed against rebels—hundreds or thousands killed by cannon fire, Muslims sewn into pigskins before their execution—they speak rather of the Great Rebellion, an altogether preferable term.
¹³⁴
Whether it may be seen as the beginning of the Indian independence movement has long been a politically controversial issue and does not need to be settled here. The important point is that it was a rebellion, not a revolution. The rebels had no other program than a return to pre-British conditions. Unlike the American and European revolutionaries, and also unlike their Taiping contemporaries, they outlined no vision of a new order adequate to the challenges of the day. In
contrast to the Taiping, they never built a counterstate capable of lasting beyond a short-lived military occupation. Nevertheless, it is worth including the Indian Rebellion in a comparative series of the great midcentury convulsions.

The Great Rebellion differs from earlier and later Indian uprisings in that it was not a protest movement of the rural population but a soldiers' revolt—a constant danger in a military apparatus comprising (in 1857) 232,000 Indians alongside 45,000 British.
¹³⁵
The unrest gathered momentum in the Army of Bengal, the largest of the three armies of the East India Company. Discontent had been growing for a century and a half among the Indian troops, or
sepoys
. Now rumors began to spread that they were to be forcibly converted to Christianity, and these were further fueled in 1856 when orders came for troops to be deployed overseas, where they might be required to violate religious prohibitions. For some time the upper castes of the Northwest Provinces (once the backbone of the army of British India) had been losing their privileges. Many members of this military elite came from the princely state of Awadh (or Oudh), which the British had annexed not long before in an action that was generally seen as arbitrary in the extreme. In Awadh a broad coalition of social forces joined the rebellious soldiers: peasants, large landowners (
taluqdar
), craftsmen, and so on. The beginning of the revolt can be precisely dated to May 10, 1857, the day on which three
sepoy
regiments mutinied in the city of Meerut in the vicinity of Delhi, after some of their comrades had been put in irons for refusing to use cartridges treated with animal fat (in violation of both Hindu and Muslim law). The soldiers killed their European officers and marched on Delhi; the revolt spread in no time at all. Attacks on European officers and their families were not only spontaneous expressions of rage but also a radicalizing tactic; there could be no return to normal conditions after that. From the British point of view, a nadir was reached when the rebels blocked the Great Trunk Road linking Bengal to the Khyber Pass. It was around this time that the British counteroffensive moved into top gear, with troops pulled out of Iran, China (where preparations for the Second Opium War were under way), and the Crimea. As in China (though there the scale was much larger), the investment and capture of rebel cities tipped the military balance. The fall of Lakhnau (or Lucknow) on March 1, 1858, signaled that the colonial power was winning through. The last battles were concentrated in central India, where the rani of Jhansi heroically fought the British at the head of her mounted troops. In July 1858 the governor-general announced that the rebellion was over.

The Indian rebels drove the colonial state closer to collapse than it had ever been before or would be again, much as the Taiping Revolution (strengthened by Nian rebels operating independently of it) did with the Qing dynasty. Despite a widespread hatred of the foreign rulers among the Indian population, the rebellion never had a broad social base outside Awadh comparable to that of the Taiping; it was much more of a regional phenomenon. The whole of southern India was unaffected, and the other two
sepoy
armies—those of Bombay and
Madras—played scarcely any role. In Bengal itself, the British had such a strong military presence that the region around Calcutta remained calm. In the Punjab, annexed only in 1848, it was an advantage for the colonial state that the local upper classes and indigenous Sikh fighters had been well treated. Indeed, Sikhs would form the core of the British army in India after the rebellion. With Scottish Highland troops and Gurkhas from the Nepalese Himalayas, they were among the most important of those heroic “martial races” which, in the eyes of the British public, ensured the security of the empire.

Thanks to a much greater media presence, exemplified by the superb
Times
correspondent William Howard Russell (who later also reported on the American Civil War), the international public was far better informed about the events in India than about the uprisings in the Chinese interior.
¹³⁶
India was a step ahead of China in terms of communications technology. Telegraph links inside the country, unless cut by the rebels, served the British for both military and propaganda purposes. Moreover, a vast literature of memoirs subsequently appeared in Britain. The Great Rebellion lasted for a much shorter time than the Taiping Revolution: just twelve months, in comparison with fourteen years. Nor can it be said that it depopulated whole areas of the country or physically exterminated sections of the upper classes. Also the origins of the two movements were different: in India an army mutiny, in China a civilian religious movement that took up arms under the pressure of its enemies. Whereas Christianity gave the Taiping Revolution its initial impulse, the Indian rebellion sought to fend off the threat of Christianization. But in India too, millenarian religiosity played a certain role, more in the case of Muslims than Hindus. On the eve of the revolt, Muslim preachers had been predicting the end of British rule, and at its high point a call to jihad mobilized large sections of the population (leaving it open whether they should also vent their fury against Indian non-Muslims). Strategically acute leaders, however, tried to prevent hostilities between Muslims and Hindus from weakening the rebellion.
¹³⁷
It was certainly not, as some British suspected at the time, the result of a great (even worldwide) Muslim conspiracy. Still, the religious dimension, which underlies some Indian myths of national resistance, should not be overlooked.

The revolts in India and China did have a patriotic side to them, and in this respect they were close to the Hungarian uprising of 1848–49. They might perhaps be described as proto-nationalist, although in India it is unclear how the traditional division of the Subcontinent would have been overcome if the rebellion had been successful. The movements in India and China failed more dramatically than the European Revolutions of 1848–49. In all cases, the existing social and political order initially came out of the challenge stronger than before. The East India Company dissolved, leaving the Crown to exercise direct rule over India right up to 1947; the Qing dynasty lasted only until 1911. In China, the Tongzhi Restoration (c. 1861–74) saw the Qing state embark on timid reforms of a military nature more than a political or social one. In India, British
rule became conservative and conserving after 1858, based more than ever on traditional elites and marked by an increasingly racial sense of distance from the Indians. Only after the turn of the century would it be forced to respond to new political challenges from the Indian elite. In neither case can it be said that “reactionary forces” won out against the bearers of “progress.” The Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan and Nana Sahib (actually Govind Dhondu Pant, the best-known leader of the Indian rebellion, at least abroad) were hardly people who could have led their country into the modern age. Here the analogies with Europe end.