US Marines fight rebellious Boxers outside Beijing Legation Quarter, 1900 – copy of painting by Sergeant John Clymer

(14) CHINESE CIVIL WARS – TAIPING & BOXER REBELLIONS
(1850-1864 & 1899-1901)

China has such a long history of wars within itself that one really could do a Top 10 list merely for Chinese civil wars or rebellions. Indeed, one could round up a Top 10 for rebellions in Qing China alone. Few things were as spectacular in modern history – or loom as large in the hindsight of a Chinese revolutionary regime succeeding it – as the decline and fall of the Qing Empire, fighting endless rebellions within itself, until it was ultimately overwhelmed by the final one.

And by spectacular, I mean on a scale of international wars for casualties, or even world wars in the case of the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping Rebellion might well be styled China’s world war, in the same way that the Second Congo War is styled as Africa’s world war. It was effectively a world war fought within China – on a scale of casualties exceeding the First World War, or even matching the Second World War by some estimates. Although characteristically for Chinese wars, the overwhelming majority of casualties was not from actual violence in war, but from the famine and disease that invariably accompanied the disruption of the delicate balance or supply chains of Chinese peasant agriculture.

I’ve heard it said that the Qing Empire literally faced a peasant rebellion an average of every hour or so. I don’t know the truth of that assertion, which probably tallies up the hours in the numerous historical rebellions against the Qing, although I also suspect that many or most rebellions were too limited or localised to have any serious consequence.

Territories of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom held at various times during the rebellion by M. Bitton for Wikipedia “Taiping Rebellion” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Not so the Taiping Rebellion. I’ve always been fascinated by millennialist or messianic movements – and it fascinates me that Qing China, formerly one of the most powerful imperial states in the world, if not the most imperial state, would find itself struggling and slogging it out for over a decade (or two if you count holdouts until 1871) with…a cult.

That’s right – a cult, one with a leader who proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus and declared his own Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. A cult which one would not anticipate to be particularly convincing or credible, but obviously tapped into popular unrest against the Qing.

It’s also amusing that this cult leader was effectively the equivalent of a university dropout, failing the examination for the imperial state bureaucracy. Declaring yourself the messianic leader of a heavenly kingdom and waging war against the state that failed you sounds totally like an admirable career goal in those circumstances. Why don’t more guidance counsellors recommend it?

The Taiping Rebellion marked the inexorable decline of Qing China, which was to prove terminal within half a century – and helped inspire the revolution that terminated it.

Movement of Boxers and Alliance forces during the Boxer Rebellion by SY – Wikipedia “Boxer Rebellion” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I also find the Boxer Rebellion almost as interesting as the Taiping Rebellion, because it fascinates me that Qing China could again find itself thrown into turmoil by…a secret society of mystical martial artists, generally known in English as the Boxers, but known in Chinese by the even more awesome name of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists.

It’s like that mysterious secret organization under crime lord Han in the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon – which seemed to spend all its time pointlessly drilling in martial arts to take over the world, rather than, you know, training with guns or something, existed in historical real life.

Or perhaps the Jedi in Star Wars, as like the Jedi, the Boxers claimed magical force or supernatural power, particularly invulnerability to bullets (much like the Jedi deflecting lasers)

Unlike the Taiping Rebellion which pitted itself against the Qing state and was inspired by foreign influences, particularly Christian missionaries, the Boxer Rebellion declared its slogan of supporting the Qing state and exterminating foreigners, particularly Christian missionaries.

One might consider the Boxing Rebellion as essentially the Chinese version of its near contemporary by eerie coincidence, the Ghost Dance (although the Taiping Rebellion could also be argued to be a Chinese Ghost Dance).

The Qing state found itself on the horns of a dilemma, but with those Righteous and Harmonious Fists stroking its ego, sided with the Boxers – at least by the decree of the Imperial Dowager. The Chinese imperial officialdom and military were more split, some supporting the decree and others opposing it.

The Boxer Rebellion and the Qing imperial state that supported it did as well as might be expected for combatants who placed their faith in their invulnerability to bullets. That is to say, they lost – handily defeated by the Eight Nation Alliance of Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Japan, who found rare solidarity with each other in curb stomping the Qing Empire and the Boxers.

My friends and I had a joke that it’s ironic that China, the nation of Sun Tzu and The Art of War, should have such a consistent lack of military competence (similar to Italy, the nation of Machiavelli and The Prince, with its consistent lack of political competence).

Like most jokes, it’s an overstatement – but China did top The Book of Lists’ 10 Most Defeated Nations in Modern History, and about half of its entry was Qing China. So not surprisingly its wars against rebellions were slogging matches.

Sobieski at Vienna – painting by Stanislaw Chebowsk 1865-1876 National Museum in Krakow

(14) OTTOMAN CONQUESTS (1299 – 1699)

The rise and conquests of the empire that conquered Constantinople and besieged Vienna – twice, although the second time was their highwater mark of conquest.

One can draw parallels with the conquests of other empires, some more ironic than others. Perhaps the least ironic is the rise of the Ottoman Empire rivalling the conquests by the Arab caliphates it ultimately replaced in predominance in the Middle East – and indeed replayed much of the same history over the same territory. The Ottoman Empire may have lacked the range and speed of the Arab conquests, being slower and more methodical than the blitzkrieg pace of the latter but made up for it in the extent to which it invaded and conquered within Europe.

On that last point, one might draw some parallel with the Mongol conquests, aptly enough for the Turkic steppe nomadic origins of the Ottomans – as the most substantial invasion of Europe since and to rival the Mongols.

One might even draw a parallel with the Romans – aptly enough as the power that finally conquered (and saw itself as inheriting) the last of the Roman Empire. Firstly, in the rise of the Ottomans from one of numerous non-descript warring tribes on a peninsula, albeit the Anatolian rather than Italian peninsula (although as further irony, the Romans traced themselves from that peninsula as well, with their mythic origin from Troy). And secondly, in the methodical and almost inexorable nature of its conquests – as well as its tenacity in decline, although this entry is concerned with the former.

It is also intriguing how much of the origins of modern history might be traced to the looming presence of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the Mediterranean – such as the discovery of the New World from seeking to find alternate trade routes to Asia and so on.

Again, one might see the parallel with the Arab conquests, with the Ottoman conquests shaping modern history similarly to the Arab conquests shaping medieval history. And like the Arabs, one of the first obstacles the Ottomans faced on their path to conquest was the eastern Roman empire, albeit much declined from its days of defending against the Arabs. Still, the Ottoman siege(s) and capture of Constantinople were an epic end to the eastern Roman empire – and springboard for further Ottoman conquests.

With its conquest of the Byzantine Empire as well as Constantinople as its newly conquered capital and its control of the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was a transcontinental empire at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa for almost half a millennium, albeit half of that again in decline.

Egypt was of course the jewel in the crown of their African empire – but it extended westwards from Libya to Morocco (and briefly into the Atlantic with the Canary Islands), becoming the basis of the fabled Barbary corsairs or pirates which even fought the United States, although these were only nominally under Ottoman control. The Ottomans also extended southwards to the Horn of Africa – and into naval wars in the Indian Ocean.

In Asia, they inherited the caliphate and its predominance in the Middle East, extending south through the Arabian peninsula, although held at bay by a resurgent Persia under their own Turkic Safavid dynasty.

However, it was in Europe that they had their conquests that define this entry – they conquered the Balkans, extending to Crimea with the Crimean Khanate or Tatars, successors to the Mongol Golden Horde, as their vassal state, and also reached to the heart of Europe to besiege Vienna. Although apart from its defeats when besieging Vienna, it encountered significant holdouts or resistance elsewhere – Croatia, Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, Venice and the naval Battle of Lepanto.

If I were to pick one war from among these conquests to encapsulate them, it would be the war that saw their second siege of Vienna, particularly famed for the charging Polish cavalry or winged hussars that broke the Ottoman siege – the Great Turkish War or Wars of the Holy League from 1683 to 1699.

The Great Turkish War was fought between the Ottoman Empire on one side and the Holy League on the other – the Holy Roman Empire, the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia, Hungary and Venice.

And following from that defeat in the Battle of Vienna, the Great Turkish War ended with Turkish defeat – and defeat that was to prove the highwater mark of their conquests in Europe, losing substantial territory in Hungary and elsewhere.

Thereafter the Ottomans steadily lost their conquests in the Balkans even as it was propped up by Britain against Russia, resulting in it being styled as the “sick man of Europe” in the nineteenth century – somewhat overconfidently, as the Allies were to find out in WW1, although ultimately it collapsed in that war.

Timur defeats the Sultan of Delhi in the winter of 1397-1398, painting dated 1595-1600 (public domain image – Wikipedia “Timurid Conquests and Invasions”)

(12) TIMURID CONQUESTS & INVASIONS (1370-1405)

The wars of the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur or Tamurlane were the last of the great horse blitzkriegs – “the last of the major nomadic conquerors of the Eurasian Steppe” mauling other states of such formidable reputation as the Golden Horde, Mamluk Sultanate, the Ottomans, and Delhi Sultanate. He was even eyeing off Ming China before his death.

If I were to pick which of the four major successor states to the Mongol Empire were to rival its reputation in conquest, I would have picked any of the other three – the Golden Horde, the Yuan Dynasty in China, or the Ilkhanate in Persia – before the runt of the litter, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. Of course, by the time of Timur, the Ilkhanate had disintegrated into fragmentation, and the Yuan had fallen to the new Ming Dynasty, but even then I would have gone with the Golden Horde.

I certainly wouldn’t have picked the Chagatai Khanate to defeat the Golden Horde – nor to defeat the Mamluks who had defeated the OG Mongol Empire or the Ottomans who had just started to steamroller their way up the Balkans, but then I hadn’t reckoned on the Timurnator (heh)

“The Timurid conquests and invasions started in the late 14th century with Timur’s control over the Chagatai Khanate and ended at the start of the 15th century with the death of Timur. Due to the sheer scale of Timur’s wars, and due to the fact that he was generally undefeated in battle, he has been regarded as one of the most successful military commanders of all time. These wars resulted in Timur’s supremacy over Central Asia, Persia, the Caucasus, the Levant, and parts of South Asia and eastern Europe, and they also resulted in the formation of the short-lived Timurid Empire”.

Timur gained control of the western Chagatai Khanate (in Transoxiana) but because he was not descended from Genghis Khan, he ruled under the title of Amir through a puppet Khan, although he was to marry a descendant of Genghis (the widow of his defeated opponent) and style himself as the son-in-law of Genghis Khan. He also styled himself as the Sword of Islam, although ironically his major opponents were the other major Islamic states of Eurasia.

As the Sword of Islam and in the Mongol family tradition, he unleashed all hell across Eurasia, with casualties estimated in the millions. Timur gained control of the western Chagatai Khanate in 1370 and for the next thirty five years he conquered the remnants of the Ilkhanate in Persia and “led a series of military campaigns defeating the Khans of the Golden Horde, the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and Syria, the emerging Ottoman Empire, as well as the Delhi Sultanate in the Indian subcontinent…these conquests led to the creation of the Timurid Empire, which fragmented shortly after his death.”

Shortly before his death, Timur “had even attempted to restore the Yuan dynasty” in China.

The Golden Horde never recovered from Timur, disintegrating into smaller khanates that were ultimately swallowed up by the Russian state. While the Ottomans were defeated by him – giving the Byzantine Empire some small respite before its death – they bounced back to bigger and better things.

As for the Delhi Sultanate, “Delhi’s conquest was one of the greatest victories of Timur, arguably surpassing Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan, because of the harsh conditions of the journey and the achievement of taking down the richest city of the world at the time. Delhi suffered a great loss due to this and took a century to recover.”

Even after that century, Timur still conquered India from beyond the grave – or more precisely through one of his descendants, his great-great-grandson Babur, who conquered India to forge arguably the most powerful imperial state in the subcontinent prior to the British, the Mughal Empire, which survived even in decline to the nineteenth century.

Union soldiers destroying telegraph poles and railroads in Georgia, 1864 – art by F.O.C. Darley and engraved by Alexander Hay Ritchie, restoration by Adam Cuerden and available from the US Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Division (public domain image – Wikipedia “Economic Warfare”)

(11) ECONOMIC WARFARE

“War is a racket.”

Booty, loot, spoils, plunder, pillaging and sacking – not to mention piracy and slavery. And for when you can’t take it with you or just want to weaken your enemy, there’s laying waste, salting the earth or scorched earth, ravaging, razing, and general devastation or destruction. While vandalism has come to mean the latter, its historical origin in the name of the Vandals was more the despoilation of the former.

All warfare is economic warfare.

Well, not quite but close. Warfare consistently has had economic resources or targets as motive or means of waging war, albeit not universally.

That goes all the way back to its origins in prehistoric warfare, where the economic resources as motive for war were as rudimentary as hunting grounds or foraging territory.

From agriculture onwards, the economic motives of war became more concrete and durable for occupation, storage or transit – from grain to gold and everything in between, as well as the land from which economic resources were grown or mined. Humans themselves became economic resources through slavery of captives (although if more contemporary tribal warfare is any guide, prehistoric warfare often involved women as captives).

Logistics and supply lead naturally to the subject of economic warfare, which in pre-modern history was predominantly looting or sacking. Indeed, prior to the rapid growth of productivity in modern history, most windfalls of economic growth in history seem to be from population growth, trade in luxuries – and above all, from military conquest and warfare.

In short, whether war has been a racket, it certainly has been robbery on a grand scale throughout history – or vandalism on an equally grand scale.

Or piracy if you prefer – while pirates are usually seen on the opposing side to states in history, there are states that have effectively been pirates or deployed piracy (or privateers) as a means of war. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter is the piracy of other European states, most notably the English, on Spanish shipping from the Americas – although attacks on shipping, most notably by submarines, has been a feature of modern warfare, albeit to sink rather than sack the ships and their cargoes.

Yes, we tend to think of economic warfare as the modern use of economic means of state power as a substitute for military force – soft power rather than hard power – but economic warfare has been used in tandem with military force to weaken enemy states for thousand years, even by such basic (and classic) means as “ravaging the crops of the enemy”.

However, the same modern developments in trade and industry that have seen wars become comparatively less lucrative as a means for economic motives – as well as more costly – have also lent themselves to greater sophistication and effect for economic policies or warfare separately from military force.

“Policies and measures in economic warfare may include blockade, blacklisting, preclusive purchasing, rewards and the capturing or the control of enemy assets or supply lines. Other policies may include tariff discrimination, sanctions, the suspension of aid, the freezing of capital assets, the prohibition of investment and other capital flows, expropriation, and debasing the target’s currency by counterfeiting”.