Chapter 19

• China’s Crisis
• 1793, the Chinese emperor Qianlong declined Britain’s request that China rescind or loosen restrictions on trade.
• China was too large, victim of success
• Chinese bureaucracy did not keep pace with growing population
• bandit gangs and peasant rebellions became common
• China’s crisis led to the Taiping Uprising
• initial successes led to establishment of capital in Nanjing in 1853
• rebellion came to end in 1864, resolution of the Taiping rebellion consolidated the power of the provincial gentry even more

• the Opium Wars show the transformation of China’s relationship with Europe

• the British responded with the first Opium War (1839–1842)
• second Opium War (1856–1858)
• China was also defeated by the French (1885) and Japanese (1895)
• Qing dynasty was deeply weakened at a time when China needed a strong government to deal with modernization
• “unequal treaties” inhibited China’s industrialization
• the Chinese government tried to act against problems
• conservative leaders feared that development would harm the landlord class
• Boxer Uprising (1898–1901): militia organizations killed many Europeans and Chinese
• Christians, besieged foreign embassies in Beijing
• growing number of educated Chinese became disillusioned with the Qing dynasty
• the government agreed to some reforms in the early twentieth century, but not enough—the imperial order collapsed in 1911

• The Ottoman Empire and the West in the Nineteenth Century
• 1750: the Ottoman Empire was still strong, at center of the Islamic world; by 1900, was

• known as “the sick man of Europe”
• region by region, Islamic world fell under Christian rule, and the Ottomans couldn’t prevent
• it
• central Ottoman state had weakened
• the economy was hit hard by Western developments
• had reached a state of dependency on Europe
• Ottomans attempted ambitious reforms, going considerably further than the Chinese
• late eighteenth century: Selim III tried to establish new military and administrative structures
• after 1839 more far-reaching measures Tanzimat emerged
• supporters of reform saw the Ottoman Empire as a secular state
• opposition coalesced around the “Young Turks” between military and civilian elites
• military coup gave the Young Turks real power
• by 1900 China and the Ottoman Empire were “semicolonies” both gave rise to a new nationalist conception of society
• China: the imperial system collapsed in 1911
• Ottoman Empire: the empire collapsed following World War I
• Chinese revolutionaries rejected Confucian culture much more than Turkish leaders rejected Islam