Sarah Paine

Very high mortality rates.

Before you dismiss this paradigm...

You've seen it operating in real time in Syria and Ukraine.

There are people who do this.

And it also explains why all those ancient ruins are ruins.

This sort of warfare is ruinous.

But anyway, it lies at the basis of many of the great civilizations of Eurasia.

This is how they did things.

All right.

So I'm going to start my story in the mid-19th century, when the Chinese were beset by a whole series of rebellions that just about wrecked them.

And the Russians take advantage of all of this.

Remember the second rule of continental empires, no great power neighbors.

And the Russians repeatedly derail the rise of China by scripting the Chinese to do things that are remarkably detrimental to Chinese interests, but pretty good for Russian interests.

And it takes the Chinese a long time to figure it out.

They have governments coming and going in this period.

It's a difficult period, but they eventually figure it out by the time Mao reunifies China in 1949.

So I'm going to go through each of those examples in turn, starting with a really big one, which are the Opium Wars.

This is when Britain and France are coming at China in order to force China to trade on their terms.

And this corresponds with the two biggest rebellions of China's period of rebellions, the Taiping and the Nian Rebellion.

So here's a big chart that's a simplified chart.