The Center Holds

Over the course of the mid-nineteenth-century wars, the dominant powers (Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Qing China) came to espouse a surprisingly similar orientation toward legitimate statehood. While the liberation wars of the late-eighteenth century witnessed the creation of many new republics, by midcentury those republics and the empires that had survived pursued greater central authority. Although sometimes at odds with liberal rhetoric of the age (especially among reforming Republicans in the U.S.), these actors recognized the importance of coercion of violence to maintaining their states. The victory of centralized authority, whether it took the form of empires or republics, reinforced the power of established states and of organized, aggressive defense of that order.

Epilogue

In all of the major mid-century rebellions, dominant powers prevailed. The Indians, Polish, Confederates, and Taiping were suppressed. But popular memories of the insurgencies lived on and their legacies took surprising shape. In India, Poland, and China, the wars came to be regarded as proto-nationalist or celebratory moments. In the U.S., white Southerners adopted a stance of victimization at odds with how their fellow insurgents behaved. The result, in the U.S., was a less dynamic and more racialized memory of the war, as seen in Lost Cause ideology. The traces of nineteenth-century insurgency today remain as ghost nations. They float through history, shaping the nature of the empires and states from which they tried to emerge. In some places, they reemerged later and succeeded. In other places, the people who formed them pursued their political or economic or social goals through alternative means.

What Kind of War Is This?

When considering the role of war, historians often focus on war’s role as a unifier. Citizens rally to the flag and society anneals in the face of suffering and sacrifice. Even military defeat can drive this process when people build a narrative of tragedy that inspires devotion. However, this phenomenon was not the only connection between wars and nation-building. Most insurgents in mid-nineteenth-century conflicts resorted to irregular warfare, in form or another. This decision impeded their efforts to obtain political autonomy. Irregular war generated stiff counter-insurgencies from dominant powers, weakened domestic and foreign support for rebels, and diminished claims to civilizational fitness necessary for inclusion in the family of nations. The great powers of the nineteenth century did not collude about the best ways to suppress rebellion but they shared the same reactions to insurgencies nonetheless.

Introduction

In the mid-nineteenth century, a set of wars convulsed India, the U.S., Poland, and China. Although typically studied separately, the wars followed similar patterns and even responded to each other. This influence was felt most fully when powerful nations offered or withheld their support for insurgents, but it also operated in a more subtle fashion. The discussions about sovereignty, authority, and rebellion preoccupying literate observers created a global conversation that shaped the experiences of people engaged in widely different enterprises. Unlike the liberal wars of nation-building in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, these conflicts revolved around common problems of sovereignty and state-building. Participants at the time saw these connections and used references and analogies to other conflicts to advance their own interests. This global view restores the U.S. Civil War to its historical place as one of several insurgent challenges in the era.

All Wars Are World Wars

The common aspirations of mid-nineteenth-century insurgents around the world channelled them into similar patterns of language. Insurgents rejected designations as criminals or mutineers, while dominant powers sought to use “rebel” to stigmatize the causes of those who sought to break apart established states. This linguistic entanglement helped shape the decisions of foreign powers when they decided to intervene or withhold help from participants in the wars. Try as they might to distinguish the uniqueness of their experience, the Sepoy, the Taiping, the Poles, and the Confederates all found themselves ensnared in the same web of global analogies and historical examples. As a result, their fates rested not just on their own abilities but also on the experience of other rebels around the globe.