Sarah Paine

And this perfect storm of problems, I'll go through three, it's always a good number, people can remember three things, talking about the civil wars afflicting China, that in an age of accelerating European imperialism, and also the Manchus who ran China, they're only 2% of the population, were suffering from all kinds of dynastic decline, which I will get into.

China had reached its pre-industrial limits to growth.

Its population kept on going up and up, but its agricultural predictivity just could not feed people.

And so people are trying to farm really marginal lands.

Either they're too vertical, they don't have reliable rainfall, and you're getting massive soil erosion doing these things, and you're also getting a lot of famines.

And famines are both the cause and the effect of civil wars.

And this map, you can just see, I've named some of the big rebellions on this one.

It's to give you a sense that these rebellions affect all of China, not just a little here and there, but a lot of everywhere.

And now I'm gonna give you a table

And this is a simplified table.

It only goes 1845 to 1895.

It's part of a much bigger table that would cover the entire 19th century.

And that table is an oversimplification.

So the point is, this is not business as usual.

In the red box, that is the height of these rebellions, 1851 to 1878.

The biggest rebellion in there is the Taipings.

It's estimated that 20 million people died in the Taiping rebellion.

to put that figure in perspective.

And people don't know how many people died in all these things.

China didn't know how many people they had, much less how many people they lost.