Thammasat University students interested in economics, business, history, China, sociology, comparative religion, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 10 October Zoom webinar on The Fate of the Taiping Rebellion.

The event, on Thursday, 10 October 2024 at 3pm Bangkok time, is organized by the Faculty of Business and Economics and Centre for Quantitative History, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The event announcement explains:

• Professor Nuno Palma, who teaches economics at the University of Manchester, the United Kingdom, and his co-authors show, using a new dataset, that scholars educated in Confucian academies became a key force in the suppression of the Taiping. The civil service examinations system helped maintain political stability and associated rents by endowing elites with a stake in the Qing status quo.
• Nuno’s co-authors: Chenyang Qi (Tsinghua) and Jinlin Wei (HKUST)
• Discussant: Debin Ma, Professor of Economic History, University of Oxford

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the Taiping Rebellion.

Students are invited to register at this link for the event:

https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/5917014007444/WN_H-RXEWfBSvahL1MR-toEFA#/registration

With any questions or for further information, please write to

cqhinfo@hku.hk

The Taiping Rebellion, also known as the Taiping Civil War or the Taiping Revolution, was a civil war in China between the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

The conflict lasted 14 years, from its outbreak in 1850 until the fall of Taiping-controlled Nanjing—which they had renamed Tianjing “heavenly capital”—in 1864.

However, the last rebel forces were not defeated until August 1871.

Estimates of the conflict’s death toll range between 20 and 30 million people, representing 5–10% of China’s population at that time.

While the Qing ultimately defeated the rebellion, the victory came at a great cost to the state’s economic and political viability.

The uprising was led by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka who had proclaimed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ. Hong sought the religious conversion of the Han people to his syncretic version of Christianity, as well as the political overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and a general transformation of the mechanisms of state.

Rather than supplanting China’s ruling class, the Taiping rebels sought to entirely upend the country’s social order.

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom located at Nanjing managed to seize control of significant portions of southern China.

At its peak, the Heavenly Kingdom ruled over a population of nearly 30 million people.

Two years ago, Professor Palma coauthored a research article, “The rise and fall of paper money in Yuan China, 1260–1368.”

Here is the article’s abstract:

Following the Mongol invasion of China, the Yuan (1260–1368) dynasty was the first political regime to introduce a precious metal standard and deploy paper money as the sole legal tender. Drawing on a new dataset on money issues, prices, warfare, imperial grants, taxation, natural disasters, and population, we find that a silver standard initially consolidated the Chinese currency market.

However, persistent fiscal pressures eventually compelled rulers to ease the monetary standard, and a fiat standard was adopted. We show that inflation was high in the early and late periods of the dynasty but remained moderate for nearly half a century. We find that military pressure, particularly civil war, generated fiscal demands that led to the over-issuance of money.

By contrast, natural disasters and imperial grants did not trigger the over-issue of money. Warfare was much more likely to increase paper money issues under the fiat standard than during the silver standard period.

The article begins:

Yuan China (1260 to 1368) was the first minority-led dynasty that ruled the entire Chinese empire. The Yuan were a Mongol dynasty that ruled for only around a century, but they had a long-lasting influence on China’s culture, economy, and politics. At the time, the Chinese (Han) people regarded the Mongols as unsophisticated, and viewed their arrival as disturbing China’s economy, culture, and society.

However, the Yuan brought about the territorial unification of China after a century-long split caused by warfare, developing the sciences and practice of medicine, geography, and astronomy. They also improved the social status of merchants and artisans, and developed China’s infrastructure and transportation systems.

By introducing silver-convertible paper money, the Mongols combined their long traditions of using silver as a medium of exchange with China’s existing paper money regime, which fostered domestic trade as well as international commerce, and enabled China to de part from an iron and copper coin-based economy into a silver-backed paper money economy.

As the first political regime in history that pegged paper money to precious metals, and the first that deployed fiat money as the sole legal tender, the silver standard implemented by the Yuan was centuries ahead of the gold standard or fiat money systems later introduced in Europe.

A comprehensive study of the Yuan’s paper money regime provides insights into how the first precious metal standard operated under an imperial regime and suggests the factors that correlated with money issuance under the different monetary standards operated under the Yuan. Based on a wealth of printed primary sources, we constructed a new and comprehensive dataset of the Yuan dynasty’s annual money issues, price indexes, imperial grants, population, taxation, warfare, and natural disasters.

The data series, substantiated with qualitative historical evidence, enable us to study the evolution of the Yuan empire’s monetary regimes, examine the relationship between paper money issues and the government’s fiscal constraints, and investigate the factors that explain the over-issuance that eventually led to hyperinflation as the dynasty collapsed. Despite its importance in Chinese economic history, the Yuan’s monetary regime has drawn less interest than other dynasties.

Early studies on Yuan’s paper money focused on its formats and designs, or in estimating issuance totals. When more historiographical sources became available, scholars began to delineate the evolution of the Yuan’s paper money regime or concentrated their studies on exploring its fiscal structure and taxation system. 6 Although these studies formed valuable work about the Yuan’s monetary regime from different perspectives, several questions were missed that are needed to understand the Yuan’s monetary regime.

In this paper, we concentrate on the reasons for over-issuance and the role of the silver standard. Using our dataset, we test the relationship between warfare, imperial grants, natural disasters, and money issuances. We find that pegging to silver effectively regulated the Yuan’s paper money issuance, but persistent fiscal constraints gradually com pelled Yuan rulers to abandon silver convertibility.

In 1276, just 16 years after implementing the silver standard, the Yuan’s paper money became nominally convertible (i.e. often inconvertible, when no silver was available at a given exchange bureau), and it became inconvertible in 1310. Nonetheless, inflation remained moderate, except during the dynasty’s early years, and again during its final two decades. We show that fiscal motivations associated with warfare – and in particular, civil war – coincided with over-issuance. In addition, we find that the money supply elasticity varied little between the full and nominal silver standard eras but increased substantively in the fiat era.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)