Ricardo:
>Who enjoyed the greatest windfall of cheap resources? Poor
>England had to cross the Atlantic Ocean to obtain its cotton. Why
>coal can be classified as England's fortunate internal resource but
>not China's cotton? Why was the textile sector in China not
>mechanized despite its ample, cheap, cheap supplies of cotton?
Actually the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, a radical political and
religious upheaval that was probably the most important event in China in
the 19th century, has a lot to do with cotton and British colonialism,
according to Marx. It ravaged 17 provinces took and cost an estimated 20
million lives.
Although the leaders of the rebellion had all sorts of strange ideas about
the need for a new Christian dynasty to replace the Manchus, there was an
important social dimension as well. The movement attracted many
famine-stricken peasants, workers, and miners.
The rebels were stopped by the Western-trained "Ever-Victorious Army"
commanded by the American adventurer Frederick Townsend Ward and later by
the British officer "Chinese" Gordon. The gentry, who usually rallied to
support a successful rebellion, had been alienated by the radical
anti-Confucianism of the Taipings, and they organized under the leadership
of Tseng Kuo-fan, a Chinese official of the Manchu government. By 1862
Tseng had managed to surround Nanking, and the city fell in July 1864.
Hung, who had refused all requests to flee the city, committed suicide.
Sporadic Taiping resistance continued in other parts of the country until
1868.
Departing from his schematic notions of Asiatic despotism, Marx attributed
the rebellion to the importation of British textiles and Engels offered
solidarity to the rebels that was a far cry from the sort of soft-core
colonialism found in the 1853 Tribune articles on India. In reality, there
was no secret to British technology. Any nation, including China and Egypt,
could send one of its educated classes to Great Britain to learn the use of
advanced machinery and to supervise their use at home. This obviously is
one of the sources of tension between China and the USA today over computer
technology. To nip the upstart Chinese in the bud, gunboats were deployed.
You won't find this in Dobb-Sweezy, etc. but it makes perfect sense.
Louis Proyect
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