Boxers, China, and the World - by Robert Bickers & R G Tiedemann

About the Book

In 1900, China chose to take on imperialism by fighting a war with the world on the parched north China plain. This multi-disciplinary volume explores the causes behind what is now known as the Boxer war, examining its particular cruelties and its impact on China, foreign impe...

Book Synopsis

In 1900, China chose to take on imperialism by fighting a war with the world on the parched north China plain. This multi-disciplinary volume explores the causes behind what is now known as the Boxer war, examining its particular cruelties and its impact on China, foreign imperialism in China, and on the foreign imagination. The Boxers have often been represented as a force from China's past, resisting an enforced modernity. Here, expert contributors argue that this rebellion was instead a wholly modern resistance to globalizing power, representing new trends in modern China and in international relations. This volume will appeal to readers interested in modern Chinese, East Asian, and European history as well as the history of imperialism, colonialism, warfare, missionary work, and Christianity.

Review Quotes

This book sheds fascinating new light on many hitherto-ignored aspects of the Chinese anti-Christian insurgents known as the Boxers. Equally important, though, especially in our own troubled times, is the attention that contributors pay to the actions of foreign participants in the Boxer crisis, including the consortium of foreign troops marching under eight different flags that lifted the siege of Beijing-and then quickly squandered its claim to the moral high ground by looting Chinese national treasures and carrying out brutal campaigns of reprisal. The Boxers, China, and the World is a highly original work of scholarship that provides readers with a fittingly international and surprisingly topical lens through which to view the traumatic events of 1900.

A brilliant account.

Several chapters will be of particular interest to specialists of colonial and imperial history. . . . These chapters, like the others in this excellent book, show that a myriad of forces, traditional and modern, local and international, came into play in that long, dry summer of 1900.

The essays in this volume range from detailed explorations of the sources of this violence to broader inquiries into its global consequences, including pan-Asian sympathies in India, widespread criticism of foreign looting in the Western and Japanese press, and a common understanding that indiscriminate retribution against people resisting alien intrusions can be counterproductive. This book is of great value to students of Chinese and world history and to anyone inclined to think about history's lessons for the contemporary world.

This is an important book, representing the latest state of the art on the subject.

About the Author

Robert Bickers is professor of history at the University of Bristol and co-director of the British Inter-University China Centre. R. G. Tiedemann is senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Christianity in China, King's College London.