The Scramble for China

Beginning before the First Opium War, Robert Bickers explains how military technology, commerce and imperial ambition transformed China’s relationship with Britain and other foreign powers. Defeat opened treaty ports and widened foreign privileges, while rebellion and fiscal crisis placed increasing pressure on the Qing state.

The narrative moves between diplomats, merchants, missionaries, soldiers and Chinese officials, treating foreign expansion and Chinese responses as parts of the same history. The Taiping and Boxer upheavals reveal both the violence of domestic crisis and the opportunism of outside powers. Bickers ends by showing that China was gravely weakened but never partitioned in the manner of Africa, a distinction central to later Chinese nationalism.