A Choice Outstanding Academic Title The White Lotus War (1796–1804) in central China marked the end of the Qing dynasty’s golden age and the fatal weakening of the imperial system itself. What started as a local rebellion grew into a serious political crisis, as the central government was no longer able to operate its military machine. Yingcong Dai’s comprehensive investigation reveals that the White Lotus rebels would have remained a relatively minor threat, if not for the Qing’s ill-managed response. Dai shows that the officials in charge of the suppression campaign were half-hearted about the fight and took advantage of the campaign to pursue personal gains. She challenges assumptions that the Qing relied upon local militias to exterminate the rebels, showing instead that the hiring of civilians became a pretext for misappropriation of war funds, resulting in the devastatingly high cost of the war. The mishandled demilitarization of the militiamen prolonged the hostilities when many of the dismissed troops turned into rebels themselves. The war’s long-term impact presaged the beginning of the disintegration of the Qing in the mid-nineteenth century and eruptions of the Taiping Rebellion and other uprisings. The White Lotus War will interest students and scholars of late imperial and modern Chinese history, as well as history buffs interested in the warfare of the early modern world.

The reign of Emperor Jiaqing (1796-1820 CE) has occupied an awkward position in studies of China's last dynasty, the Qing. Conveniently marking a watershed between the prosperous eighteenth century and the tragic post-Opium War era, this quarter century has nevertheless been glossed over as an unremarkable interlude separating two well-studied epochs of transformation. White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates presents a major reassessment of this period by examining how the emperors, bureaucrats, and foreigners responded to the two crises that shaped the transition from the Qianlong to the Jiaqing reign. Wensheng Wang argues that the dramatic combination of internal uprising and transnational piracy, rather than being a hallmark of inexorable dynastic decline, propelled the Manchu court to reorganize itself through modifications in policymaking and bureaucratic structure. The resulting Jiaqing reforms initiated a process of state retreat that pulled the Qing Empire out of a cycle of aggressive overextension and resistance, and back onto a more sustainable track of development. Although this pragmatic striving for political sustainability was unable to save the dynasty from ultimate collapse, it represented a durable and constructive approach to the compounding problems facing the late Qing regime and helped sustain it for another century.

Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Nineteenth Century examines insurgency and counterinsurgency across the globe in the nineteenth century. The volume includes chapters from distinguished and rising historians from Europe, North and South America and covers irregular wars in Spain, Ireland, France, Latin America, China, USA, Africa, Central Asia and Burma. The authors explore links between insurgencies and nationalism, including learning curves and emulation in counterinsurgency. With a special emphasis on non-Western warfare, this volume includes case studies such as the Katanga and White Lotus rebellions largely unknown to Western readers. The military history of the nineteenth century thus reveals much more than the symmetrical warfare of Napoleon, Grant and Moltke. This volume shows the commonalities of responses more than their differences and refracts these through themes which crop up repeatedly in different times and places. These themes include common problems and solutions: the challenge of commanding local intelligence networks; public opinion; millenarianism, magic and religion; technology; ‘hearts and minds’; the legal framework of state violence; racial stereotypes and patterns of forgetting and remembering guerrilla conflicts. The first recent study to examine Western and non-Western warfare in equal measure, stressing the prevalence of commonalities between guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency across the globe, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Nineteenth Century will be of great interest to scholars of military and strategic studies, as well as modern military history. It was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Dictionary of Wars, highly praised in its first edition (1986), has now been published in a completely revised, updated, and expanded 2nd Edition. The Dictionary provides summaries of all notable wars from earliest recorded history to the present day. It affords the general reader and student with quick, useful, and accurate information - the who, where, when, what, why and how on the more than 1,800 recorded wars in human history from 2000 BC to the present. Completely updated, the Second Edition includes an additional 70 entries - on such major events as the Gulf War, the invasions of Panama and Haiti, and the Bosnian crisis.

As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

This book provides a historical study of the theory and praxis of modern insurgencies and counterinsurgencies (COIN). Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: A Global History shows that the insurgents can wage a variety of conflicts: at times conventional war which lies at the high end of their spectrum, and terrorism which is located at the lowest end of their scale. When insurgencies reach a certain critical threshold, the insurgents shift their strategy from guerrilla (irregular) war to conventional (regular) war, and at that point the level of conflict escalates to the level of civil war. When the insurgents face intense state repression, they revert to terrorist activities. When the insurgents wage guerrilla war, they can be called guerrillas. The variety of wars conducted by the insurgents is termed as unconventional war. This volume demonstrates that the insurgents in the modern world had been motivated by a trinity: greed, grievances and ideology. Kaushik Roy traces the origin of modern insurgencies and COIN from the sixteenth century by focusing on regions outside Western Eurasia. He also touches on the twin interrelated phenomena of modern insurgencies and COIN metastasising into something new at the beginning of the Information Revolution at the end of the twentieth century. This volume will be of interest to researchers and research students of history, British Empire, imperial studies, Asian studies, security studies, strategic studies, and war and conflict studies.

The many instances of regional insurgency and unrest that erupted on China’s borderlands at the turn of the nineteenth century are often regarded by scholars as evidence of government disability and the incipient decline of the imperial Qing dynasty. This book, based on extensive original research, argues that, on the contrary, the response of the imperial government went well beyond pacification and reconstruction, and demonstrates that the imperial political culture was dynamic, innovative and capable of confronting contemporary challenges. The author highlights in particular the Jiaqing Reforms of 1799, which enabled national reformist ideology, activist-oriented administrative education, the development of specialised frontier officials, comprehensive borderland rehabilitation, and the sharing of borderland administration best practice between different regions. Overall, the book shows that the Qing regime had sustained vigour, albeit in difficult and changing circumstances.

The dynastic centre and the provinces were linked by agents and ritual occasions. This book includes contributions by specialists examining these connections in late imperial China, early modern Europe, and the Ottoman empire, suggesting important revisions and an agenda for comparison.

This comprehensive volume traces the Chinese military and its experiences over the past 2,500 years, describing clashes with other kingdoms and nations as well as internal rebellions and revolutions. As the first book of its kind, China at War: An Encyclopedia expands far beyond the conventional military history book that is focused on describing key wars, battles, military leaders, and influential events. Author Xiaobing Li—an expert writer in the subjects of Asian history and military affairs—provides not only a broad, chronological account of China's long military history, but also addresses Chinese values, concepts, and attitudes regarding war. As a result, readers can better understand the wider sociopolitical history of the most populous and one of the largest countries in the world—and grasp the complex security concerns and strategic calculations often behind China's decision-making process. This encyclopedia contains an introductory essay written to place the reference entries within a larger contextual framework, allowing students to compare Chinese with Western and American views and approaches to war. Topics among the hundreds of entries by experts in the field include Sunzi's classic The Art of War, Mao Zedong's guerrilla warfare in the 20th century, Chinese involvement in the Korean War and Vietnam War, and China's nuclear program in the 21st century.

In his book War Finance and Logistics in Late Imperial China, Ulrich Theobald shows how the Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911) overcame the tyranny of logistics and successfully enlarged the territory of its empire. A detailed analysis of the long and expensive second Jinchuan war (1771 – 1776) in Eastern Tibet demonstrates that the Chinese state ordered its civilian officials as well as the common people, merchant associations, and different ethnic groups to fulfil and to foot the bill for the “common cause”. With increasing military success the state gradually withdrew from its responsibilities, believing that a War Supply and Expenditure Code (Junxu zeli) might offset the decreasing skill in and readiness to imperial leadership.