Liberalism and the Revolutions of 1848

After the defeat of Napoleon a second time at Waterloo in 1815, Europe breathed a sigh of relief. The British, who had led the defense against his final invasion, chose St. Helena in the South Atlantic as a permanent home for the exiled Emperor. Napoleon was transported to the island, which was administered by the East India Company, in 1815 and lived there for the rest of his life. He died in 1821, at 51.

At the Congress of Vienna, which ran from November 1814 through June 1815, the old ruling families of Europe got together to try to restore what they thought of as peace and order. To a large extent their priority was trying to restore the status quo ante: the borders that had existed before Napoleon’s conquests and the types of social organization that had prevailed before the French Revolution. The brother of the executed King, Louis XVI, took the French throne as Louis XVIII (the XVIIth Louis had been the dead king’s son, who had died in prison at the age of 10 in 1795); the restored king agreed to return the territories Napoleon had conquered to the nations that had held them previously. As much as possible, the Congress of Vienna tried to turn back the clock and forget that the Revolution and Napoleon had ever happened, while setting up a balance of power to check the possibility of a French imperial resurgence  A European-wide peace would hold until World War One began in 1914.

But too much had changed to return to the past. Liberals tried to distance themselves from the social leveling and economic redistribution the Jacobins had attempted, identifying instead with ideas like free trade and a limited franchise. But radicals pushed for greater equality and more rights for regular people. For instance, British workers agitated for the right to vote and for a social contract called the People’s Charter in the 1830s and 40s, but conservative Tories blocked the Chartists. Enlightenment-inspired ideas about democracy, popular sovereignty, and new ideas like socialism all came to a head in Europe by 1848, which was known as the Year of Revolutions.

Immigration to the United States

The Irish Famine, caused by a blight that rendered potatoes inedible, began in 1845.  Potatoes had proved to be an ideal crop for Ireland, and it produced enough of the crop for itself and most of the rest of British Isles—losing this important food source was disastrous for the Irish peasants.  British government aid proved incompetent and ineffective, revealing a scandalous level of prejudice against the Catholic Irish, the first colonized people of the British Crown  Over a million people in Ireland died because of the Famine, and a million more to emigrated to avoid starvation—mostly to the U.S. The population of Ireland, which had been more than 8 million in 1841, never recovered (and is still only about 4.7 million today). Food shortages spread to Scotland and central Europe, where the Czech potato harvest was also reduced by half because of the blight.

In addition to rural famines, a lot of Britain and parts of Europe had begun to industrialize, and poor urban workers were dissatisfied with their wages and living conditions, which will be described below.  In 1848, rebels temporarily took control of Vienna and forced the Austro-Hungarian Empire to end serfdom. Southern Italians revolted against the French still occupying their homeland. And a revolution in France ended the monarchy once again and created the Second French Republic. Although revolutionary movements in the German states were unsuccessful in changing their governments, they paved the way for change and resulted in massive German immigration to the US.

Migration to the US had been slow between the end of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, due to ongoing tensions with Britain and  the Napoleonic conflicts in Europe. But beginning in the 1830s and 1840s,  immigration from Europe exploded, and the United States became a “safety valve” for the underemployed, politically marginalized, and persecuted of Europe. The Irish in the 1840s were followed by Germans after 1848, who remain the largest single immigrant group.  Scandinavians began arriving after the Civil War, and but by the 1890s, most new immigrants came from southern Europe (especially Italians) and from eastern Europe—including large numbers of persecuted Jews from the Russian Empire.

By the end of the 19th century, the majority of Americans were of German ethnicity. Even today, 46 million Americans are of German descent (light blue on the map). The rest of the top five ethnicities are Black or African American (38 million, magenta, Mexican (34 million, pink), Irish (33 million, dark purple), English (24 million, light purple). This population count is complicated by the region in the southeast, stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to northern Texas, where the largest group calls itself “American” and people do not attribute their origin to any foreign nation. These 22 million people are probably mostly of English or Scotch-Irish descent, based on the history of the region. Statewide, the German pluralities range from 11% in Florida to 43% in North Dakota, which explains why the capital is named after Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

The Industrial Revolution

Social changes in Europe and America are a direct result of the Industrial Revolution – as are many of the changes in the less developed world we will discuss in a later chapter. So before we look at the rest of the world, let’s look more closely at industrialization.

The last two hundred years of human history is also the story of the Industrial Revolution and its affects.  The life of a peasant living in France, Mexico, China, India, or Ethiopia in 1100 CE was not that different from that of a similar peasant living in the same place 200 years earlier or later. But, because of technology, industrialization, and urbanization, today’s world is considerably different today than it was 200 years ago. In fact, the change has accelerated: we live much differently than our parents did when they were our age. Consider how many of you may be reading this on a hand-held electronic device, which were not all that common even ten years ago. The acceleration of life in many aspects is just one of the results of the unprecedented worldwide technological innovations of the last two centuries.

Even today, there are five necessary inputs that are required for industrialization: capital, technology, an energy source, availability of labor, and consumers. By the late 1700s, Great Britain had all of these and became the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Continental Europe and the United States soon followed.

But, why Great Britain?  Capital—wealth that is invested to create more wealth—was available to merchants and others who benefitted from world trade. The British dominated the slave trade and the corresponding cultivation of sugar during the 18th century, and those involved in the trade accumulated great wealth. Furthermore, the East India Company was also a source of capital through their trade with South Asia in tea and textiles. The Company also was the model for a successful joint-stock company, in which individual investors purchased shares, which spread ownership and limited financial liability, allowing for greater risk-taking. Soon, factories would be following the same joint-stock model in order to accumulate the necessary capital for investment.

New technology also made mass production possible, which first occurred in the British textile industry. The spinning jenny and power looms increased the efficiency of spinning wool and cotton, and then weaving the thread and yarn into cloth. From this beginning, inventors began seeing the possibilities of mechanical production in other areas such as processed foods, clothing, paper, and household items. Even today, countries usually begin on the path to industrialization through the textile and processed food industries.

Great Britain also had abundant energy sources to power the machines. Like flour mills, textile mills initially used the power of rivers to spin water wheels and turbines connected to spinning and weaving machines. Later, the development of an efficient coal-fired steam engine by Scottish the engineer James Watt made it possible to locate factories closer to cities, transportation hubs, workers, and consumers. Both water and coal are still important sources of energy throughout the world.

Agricultural improvements in the previous century and the introduction of new staple crops like the potato, imported from the Americas, produced more food using less labor. Improved nutrition allowed Britain’s population to grow, increasing the number of people available for work in the factories. With a larger population involved in a wage economy, producing goods for others and not for themselves, Great Britain also created consumers for the textiles, foods, and other products manufactured in new factories. Soon, British merchants were selling industrial products to Continental Europe and to an increasingly important market of consumers in Britain’s colonies. The ability to sell manufactured goods to a “captive” colonial market added to the rush for overseas empires by the European powers, the United States, and Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Every nation wanted consumers for the products of the “home country” and wanted to lock up the valuable natural resources needed by the industries of the empire.

The Industrial Revolution saw a gradual transition from handicrafts made in the home or in small shops to manufactures produced in factories, which in itself caused social and economic disruption—and improvement—among ordinary workers and their families. In early America, for example, a regular part of women’s work was spinning thread and yarn from wool, flax, or cotton at home, then weaving cloth and making “homespun” clothing for their families. This was hard, slow work, and took up a lot of women’s time. As soon as they were able to buy cloth from textile mills, women took advantage of the opportunity to devote much more of their time to other tasks around the farmstead. Often, they began market gardening or keeping an extra cow and churning butter to earn “pin money.” Pins were an example of a manufactured product farm families needed that could not be made on the farm. Pins and other such necessities were usually supplied by peddlers who walked across the countryside in the days before easy access to stores, and then later by general storekeepers.

The other side of handicraft manufacture, though, was the type of work done by the Huguenot weavers—descendants of refugee French Protestants—in East London. This was a whole community of people who specialized in weaving using tools and techniques that were available before the advent of large-scale textile mills. They were put out of business by the more efficient manufacturing systems that went along with the new technology, but they did not give up without a fight. Many became “Luddites,” part of a movement of handicraft workers that secretly entered factories and destroyed machinery, blaming the fictional “Ned Ludd” for the acts of sabotage (a word that refers to the wooden clogs workers wore in France, which they would throw into the machinery to break it). Governments were quick to crack down on Luddites – a couple of executions quickly took the wind out of their sails.

As mentioned above, industrialization was possible because farms were  producing high yields in the early 19th century, creating both an available workforce and a consumer market for many of the products of early industry. In addition, nations like Britain with colonies had another lucrative market for manufactures. Even after the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the United States remained a supplier of raw materials like grain, timber, cotton, and salted pork to the former “home country.” In return, Britain shipped its manufactured goods to ports like New York, where they were carried inland on the Erie Canal, and New Orleans, where they made their way up the Mississippi River to the interior. Britain also cultivated trade relationships with other new nations like those of Latin America. British representatives like the envoy sent to Simón Bolívar’s Congress of the Americas worked hard to convince these new nations not to go to the expense of trying to develop their own industries but instead to ship raw materials to Britain in exchange for cheap consumer goods from British factories.

The role of governments in industrialization should not be overlooked. Official British trade missions argued the benefits of “free trade” now that Britain’s manufacturers had gained the advantage in producing low-cost goods. But the devotion to free markets championed by Adam Smith and his disciples was new-found. When inexpensive cotton calicoes from India in the 1720s had begun to be preferred for making English clothing, the domestic wool industry had pressured Parliament into passing the Calico Acts to prohibit their import. But later, when the British textile industry began using technology that gave Britain an advantage in cotton cloth production, the government did not consider the complaints of the East London weavers, and even took steps to protect trade secrets and prevent too rapid a technology transfer to help British industry profit on its innovations. Britain began producing cotton cloth even more inexpensively than India—and suddenly the British began preaching about “free trade” and pushing to erase any tariffs or regulations that might prevent British textiles from dominating world markets.

The governments of Continental Europe and the United States quickly tired of simply being a source of raw materials for British factories and a market for British goods. To support economic development, these governments began taxing imports with tariffs to protect emerging industries from a flood of British manufactured goods. Tariffs increased the price of imports to consumers, encouraging them to buy the now-competitive domestically-produced goods. Protection from foreign competition has helped many fledgling industries get off the ground in developing nations. However, if industries remain protected, they may have less incentive to become internationally competitive in price or quality. Governments that choose to constantly raise tariffs run the risk of subsidizing their industries’ inefficiencies and reducing the welfare of their consumers as industrial improvements in other countries lower the price of imported products.

Transportation, Steam Power, and Interchangeable Parts

Most histories begin the Industrial Revolution with steam engines and many mention that by the 1820s steam-powered looms had displaced the hand weavers in the cotton industry. This description actually misses a whole generation of innovation and growth when textile mills were powered by water. The Scottish textile factories of New Lanark, for example, were begun in 1786 by David Dale using water-power technology developed by Richard Arkwright in the 1770s. New Lanark was built on the Clyde River in Scotland, and all of its machines were powered by the river until the mills closed in 1968. The American textile mills in New England that dominated the world market in the second half of the 19th century also used water power. The men who started the Boston Manufacturing Company, that built the cities of Lowell and Lawrence in Massachusetts to take advantage of the water power of the Merrimack River, visited New Lanark in 1811 to learn the technology before they began their venture.

The initial expansion of transportation networks for mass-production industries was also water-based.  In industrializing countries, canal-building became a craze from the 1820s through the 1840s. Many local canals connected newly-established towns and villages to markets all over the United States, Great Britain, and continental Europe. The Erie Canal in New York State, for instance, connected Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to Albany, where the canal met the Hudson River, navigable all the way to New York City. Over 350 miles (580 kilometers) long when completed in 1825, the Erie Canal included thirty-six locks to ease barges down a gradual decline of more than 550 feet (170 meters). As agricultural goods shipped down the Canal eventually made their way to markets in industrializing East Coast cities, pioneers established farms all along the Canal, and the Erie Canal was key to the western settlement and expansion of the United States, especially before 1865. Canal laborers were frequently Irish immigrants, who often settled nearby, once the canal was built.

Steam power soon became extremely important in transportation, as well. Until steam engines were put on riverboats, shipping had depended on either wind and river currents or on human and animal power on canal towpaths. Goods could easily be floated south from farms on America’s rivers for example, but it was much more difficult and expensive to ship products against the currents to the frontier. Flatboats and rafts accumulated at downstream ports such as New Orleans and were often broken down and burned as firewood. Steam engines made it possible to sail upstream as easily and quickly as down, causing an explosion of travel and shipping that radically changed frontier life. Ocean-going steamships made travel and shipping quicker and safer and allowed travelers and merchants to keep to regular schedules.

Steam engines were a product of early European industrialism. The first steam patent was granted to a Spanish inventor named Jerónimo Beaumont in 1606, whose engine drove a pump used to drain mines. The French scientist Papin built his steam piston in 1630 after visiting the Royal Society in London and Englishman James Watt’s 1781 engine was the first to produce rotary power that could be adapted to drive mills, wheels, and propellers. Robert Fulton, an American inventor who had previously patented a canal-dredging machine, visited Paris and caught steam fever. Fulton sailed an experimental steamboat model on the Seine, and then returned home and launched the first commercial American steamboat on the Hudson River in 1807. The Clermont was able to sail upriver 150 miles from New York City to Albany in 32 hours. In 1811, Fulton built the New Orleans in Pittsburgh and began regular steamboat service on the Mississippi.

The other transportation technology enabled by steam power, of course, was the railroad, which was even more revolutionary than the steamboat. In spite of their power and speed, steam-powered riverboats depended on rivers or occasionally on canals to run, but a railroad could be built almost anywhere. Suddenly, the expansion of commerce was no longer limited by the routes nature had provided into the frontier.

Small railroads using horses were already common in mining operations in Great Britain and Europe before the advent of steam power. The first railroads in the United States had actually been built on the East Coast before a steam engine was available to power them. Trains of cars pulled by horses looked a lot like stage-coaches on rails. But after Englishman George Stephenson’s locomotives began pulling passengers and freight in northwestern England in the mid-1820s, Americans quickly switched to steam. The first locomotive used to pull cars in the United States was the Tom Thumb, built in 1830 for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Although Tom Thumb lost its maiden race against a horse-drawn train, Baltimore and Ohio owners were convinced by the demonstration of steam technology and committed to developing steam locomotives. The B&O railroad, which had been established in 1827 to compete with the Erie Canal, already advertised itself as a faster way to move people and freight from the interior to the coast. Adding steam engines accelerated rail’s advantage over canal and river shipping.

Factories housed machinery that was too large or too expensive to be used in home production, or that used power sources like steam or water power that weren’t available to small-scale producers. The machines themselves usually displaced workers, like when the water-powered looms of New Lanark destroyed the careers of hand-loom weavers by producing large quantities of cloth at a low cost the weavers couldn’t match.  However, the new industries also created new jobs. And often, although it took fewer people to weave a given amount of cloth using the new technology, the new industries were usually producing products for much larger (sometimes even global) markets. So much cloth was made in the new industrial textile centers like New Lanark in Scotland or Lowell in America that there were often a lot of new jobs – sometimes more than had previously been available in that region.

The new factory jobs required less skill than artisanal craftwork, especially when the worker was making a larger number of standardized products. Previously, a carpenter needed to be a skilled craftsman to design and assemble a custom-built chair, but with industrialization, a less-skilled lathe operator could turn large quantities of legs that could be assembled into any number of chairs of a standard pattern. Workers doing lower-skilled jobs became as standardized as the things they made, and could be employed at a much lower cost. While more people might be working in a new factory compared to an old-fashioned craft workshop, each worker’s wages would almost always be lower.

And starting a factory was not the same as starting a craft workshop. It was no longer a slow organic process where an apprentice became a master craftsman, developed a clientele, opened his own business, then hired a few workers or apprentices of his own. The people who started factories were often not even experts at the process they were going to do – they were capitalists and investors who had access to the large sums of money needed to erect a factory and fill it with technology and workers. A class of owners grew, who had little or no connection to the workers they employed.

American inventor Eli Whitney (1765-1825) is remembered for the cotton gin, which removed the seeds from cotton fiber much more quickly than they could be picked out by hand. The cotton gin helped propel the American South into world leadership in raw cotton. By the 1850s, American plantations supplied 80 to 90% of the world cotton market. But Whitney’s most important contribution to industrialization was his technique for using machine tools to produce interchangeable parts for firearms. With Whitney’s standardized, machined parts, it no longer took a skilled gunsmith to build a weapon. Anybody with basic skills could assemble and also disassemble, repair, and maintain a rifle or handgun. Weapons became more reliable and the technique was quickly applied to other industries. Of course, since most of the intelligence in the job had been moved into the machine, the machine gradually became more valuable and the machine operator less. Whitney’s process made guns more reliable and less expensive, but he turned not only the gun parts into interchangeable parts, but also the factory employees themselves. The process continues today: in the Tesla car factory, robots running sophisticated software do most of the skilled tasks like welding, while a smaller number of human workers spend most of their time moving assemblies from place to place and programming the robots.

Socialism: Addressing the Negative Effects of Industrialization

Although it produced quality products at low prices for a growing consumer market, industrialization disrupted the lives of workers.  Since jobs were in factory towns and cities, people moved from rural areas to growing metropolitan areas.  The change was often very abrupt for those who migrated: they lost the slower rhythms of agricultural life to the time clock and subway schedules of the accelerated industrialized world.

Additionally, people were cut off from communities in which they had lived for generations, and forced to find new social relations—or fall into lonely and desperate lives. Although jobs were the attraction for the new migrants, there was no guarantee of permanent positions in the new economy. Financial cycles of boom and bust affected urban workers the most. Families were disrupted by unemployment, while traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity could be challenged when the male breadwinner was replaced by a spouse or daughter as the main source of family income, leading to violence, alcoholism and abandonment of the family by men.

Cities were often unprepared to receive so many people so quickly. Inadequate housing, sanitation, and transportation contributed to environment degradation and psychological stress. In the following illustration of London in the 1840s,  consider life for people who grew up on farms now living under these conditions, with no sign of plant life to be seen:

Many intellectuals took up the challenge of rethinking how to make society more just for industrial workers.  While the U.S. War of Independence had inspired discussion of governments formed by “we, the people,” and the French Revolution had spread the idea of legal equality of all citizens under law, a new understanding of capital and labor seemed to be needed. Workers in the new industries provided all of the labor at low wages and in dangerous conditions, while often absentee owners and investors reaped the profits. A number of industrialists such as Robert Owen tried to make their factories more humane, embracing the cooperative movement and even improving workers’ welfare with schools for their children and social gatherings. However, many business owners did not see their responsibility to workers extending beyond providing a wage for the work they performed.

Karl Marx, a German philosopher, criticized the growth of capitalism and industrialization, and brought a new analysis to economic thinking. Marx saw industrialization as the last stage of human development, a final struggle between two opposites that would create something new. According to Marx, this last battle was between the more numerous workers, whom he called the proletariat and the industrial capitalists, the bourgeoisie. Marx believed the proletariat would inevitably defeat the bourgeoisie, seize the factories, and create a socialist utopia.

After the final battle, Marx predicted a world where the workers or their government controlled the “means of production”, the factories and farms. Instead of religion, which Marx said was “the opiate of the people”, workers would develop a “class consciousness” that would help extend the worldwide proletarian revolution. Marx imagined a global working class  that transcended nations, races, and ethnic groups—his vision was for an international dictatorship of the proletariat, where all workers would unite regardless of ethnicity, language, religion, or any of the identities that had prevented European nations from forming a lasting empire.

Karl Marx and his associate, Friedrich Engels, published their ideas in the Communist Manifesto in February, 1848, just as Europe entered a year of attempted revolutions. Since these upheavals did not bring the promised dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx (who went into exile in London) continued to publish his theories and predictions, and organized the first Marxist socialist parties. He died in 1883, by which time various socialist and social democratic parties had participated in elections, but he did not live to see an actual “socialist” revolution, which would finally occur in Russia in 1917.

Even so, by the time of Marx’s death, his ideas and other forms of socialism were motivating labor organizers to form unions in which workers could negotiate for better wages and working conditions with owners, under threat of striking—stopping work at a factory and preventing others from replacing them at the machines. Socialism and communism, and their influence in governments and labor relations, will be examined more fully in later chapters.

Fertilizer

After about 1870, guano was overtaken as a source of nitrogen by nitrate-rich desert soils called Caliche. These soils were discovered in the Atacama desert, a region regarded as the driest place on earth that lay partly in Chile, partly in Peru, and partly in Bolivia. When all three nations rushed to extract and process the Caliche, Chile challenged its northern rivals for the nitrate fields. Chile’s victory in the War of the Pacific extended its border northwards to encompass the Atacama desert, including all the coastal territory that had belonged to Bolivia. Many ethnic Bolivians living around the port city of Arica still dream of throwing off the Chilean yoke and winning their country access to the Pacific again.

19th Century China and Japan

As described in Chapter Two, the origins of the modern world begin in China and by 1500, under the Ming dynasty, population, culture and technology was flourishing, and Confucian-trained government officials administered the empire.  However, after tremendous successes including the voyages of Zheng He, a degree of corruption and misrule crept into Ming imperial rule by the next century, allowing the armies of the Manchu, from north of the Great Wall, to instal a new dynasty, the Qing (“Pure”).

The new Qing emperors reinvigorated the Confucian ruling class, and China once again enjoyed a high degree of social stability, economic prosperity, and international trade.  However, Qing society rested on the laurels of previous accomplishments, regarded foreigners as ignorant barbarians, and was not receptive to expanding European influence in the region, led by the British.

By the mid-1700s, the British East India Company dominated trade and the administration of India. British ships carried Indian cloth and other products to the rest of the world; the tea dumped in Boston Harbor in 1773 came from India. The East India Company was very interested in opening up Chinese markets to trade, but China was self-sufficient and uninterested in anything the British had to offer. Chinese teas, jade, silks and porcelain were in high demand in the West, but the only payment China would accept was silver. For centuries the silver of the New World had been making its way into the Chinese economy, where it became the money supply of the world’s largest economy. The East India Company’s supply of silver was limited.

Luckily, India provided the Company with an alternative: opium from poppies, harvested in India and Burma. Although the Qing had outlawed opium imports in 1729, the East India Company controlled a virtually unlimited supply. At the beginning of the 19th century an annual average of 4,500 trunks of opium were reaching smugglers on the South China coast. The Company focused on importing opium into China, where addicts were willing to pay in silver. By 1839, over 40,000 133-pound chests of opium were bought by Chinese drug dealers. More than 1% of China’s 400 million people became addicted – many of them rich bureaucrats. China rapidly shifted from being a magnet for silver with a huge trade surplus to a net importer whose treasuries were rapidly dwindling.

Some Chinese officials wanted to legalize opium so the empire could tax it, but Confucian moralists won the policy debate. In 1839, the emperor sent one of China’s most distinguished officials, Lin Zexu, to the trading settlement of Canton to stamp out the opium trade. Lin blockaded the European trading district, raided and searched the foreigners’ warehouses, confiscated 20,000 chests containing 1200 tons of opium, and dumped it all into the ocean. The East India Company complained about its losses in London, and Queen Victoria sent a fleet including four steam-powered battleships. Lightly-armored Chinese war junks, designed to fight river pirates, were severely outgunned. The limited range of Qing cannon compared to British artillery allowed the invaders to pummel Chinese defenses from a safe distance.

The Treaty of Nanking (called the “Unequal Treaty” by the Chinese) opened five Chinese ports to European traders, gave the British the island of Hong Kong, and required China to establish diplomatic relations with Great Britain as an equal power rather than continuing to treat all foreigners as barbarians unworthy of official notice. The Chinese were also compelled to pay Britain for the opium Lin had destroyed. China’s embarrassing defeat by the British was followed by another defeat in the Second Opium War (1856-60) that resulted in another unequal treaty giving access to French and Russian merchants. By the 1890s, 90 ports of call were available to more than 300,000 European and American traders, diplomats, and missionaries.

The weakness of the Qing empire against foreign aggression was exacerbated by the ongoing opium crisis and by crumbling infrastructure and famine in the countryside. Magistrates and officials addicted to opium were ineffective and often diverted money that should have been spent maintaining dams and irrigation canals to their own uses. A series of peasant revolts swept through south China in the 1850s and 1860s, most notably the Taiping Rebellion which killed 30 million people over a fifteen-year period. The leader of the rebellion was Hong Xiuquan, a young man who had become unhinged after failing the grueling civil service exam four times. Hong had a vision and declared he was the little brother of Christ who had been sent to China to rid the land of the Manchu foreigners and their Confucianist culture. When Hong captured Nanjing and in 1853 made it the capital of the Taiping, he first killed all the Manchu men and then marched the women outside the city and burned them to death.

Hong’s brutality and his strange interpretation of Christianity may have alienated some Europeans, but his ban on opium use antagonized more. Europe and Britain threw their support behind the Qing dynasty they had just defeated in the Opium Wars. Hong and his allies were unable to avoid the temptation to quarrel and plot against each other, which weakened their leadership. Two Taiping attempts to take Shanghai in 1860 and 1862 were repelled with British and French assistance. In 1864, the Qing and their European allies retook Nanjing and ended the regime, but the resistance continued until 1871, when the last Taiping army was completely wiped out by government forces.

Elsewhere in Asia, Japan’s insular self-confidence was also challenged by forced contact with foreigners in the 19th century.  The Japanese home islands have been united under the same imperial dynasty since the 5th century CE; the current emperor comes from the longest line of any monarch in the world. As an independent island nation, the Japanese were able to selectively accept or reject ideas and innovations from China, the powerful empire to the west.  Often they would modify and incorporate aspects of Chinese culture, like writing and Buddhism, to their own circumstances, Native Japanese Shinto religion, for instance, embraces the teachings of Buddha.

Beginning in the late 1100s, the emperor ruled indirectly, ceding power to Shoguns, who commanded an army of lesser nobles known as samurai. The Shoguns held back invasions by Mongol armies in the 1200s and maintained a large degree of separation for the empire from outside religions and cultures. This self-isolation ended in the mid-19th century, when the United States, which had been largely shut out of European-dominated China, decided to try and open trade with Japan.

American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in July 1853 with a squadron of four warships and threatened to open fire on the capital if the Japanese refused to negotiate. To demonstrate, Perry destroyed several buildings around the harbor. The American fleet withdrew to allow the Japanese to consider their options and  when they returned a year later, the Japanese agreed to a “Treaty of Peace and Amity.” Three years later a “Treaty of Amity and Commerce” was signed, offered to the Japanese by American diplomats as a less-invasive alternative to the aggressive colonialism of Britain and France in China following the Opium War.

The Japanese decided, “if we take the initiative, we can dominate; if we do not, we will be dominated.” Modernization and the embrace of new technology went hand in hand with reorganization of the national government in what became known as the Meiji Restoration. The 15th Tokugawa shogun resigned in November 1867 and direct control of government was restored to the Emperor Meiji. The samurai class (which numbered nearly 2 million) was slowly disbanded and a nationwide universal military draft was instituted in 1873. Disgruntled samurai rebelled in 1876, the Satsuma Rebellion grew into a short civil war in which the newly-formed Imperial Japanese Army won a decisive victory. The industrialization of Japan accelerated, building the strong nation we will see taking its place on the world stage in the next chapter.

Meanwhile, in China, other rebellions such as the Nian Rebellion (1853-68), the Panthay Rebellion (1855-73), and the Dungan revolt (1862-77) continued to challenge the Qing regime. In 1895, China lost its control of its tribute state Korea to Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War. The humiliating defeat for the Qing empire showed their efforts to modernize China’s military had failed and was a catalyst for a series of political actions led by revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen. China ended the nineteenth century under the control of European powers and generally considered to be “the weak man of Asia.”

Primary Sources

“Troubled Nineteenth Century” from Modern World History by Dan Allosso and Tom Williford, and is licensed CC BY-NC-SA except where otherwise noted.

Updated attribution and licensing edit by Kathy Essmiller, 3.16.23. Contact kathy.essmiller@okstate.edu if corrections are needed or suggested.