Talk by Peter Lavelle (Associate Professor, Department of History University of Connecticut)

In the 1850s, when the Taiping Rebellion threw the finances of the Qing Empire into disarray, officials scrambled to prevent their empire from crumbling. In Xinjiang, they enacted a raft of measures to urgently make up for the loss of financial support from Beijing. These measures ranged from the liquidation of state-owned livestock herds to the widespread impressment of Turkestani Muslims in agriculture and mining. Conventional histories of the Taiping-era financial crisis have often linked it to the long-term institutional development of the modern Chinese fiscal state in the context of world history. By contrast, this paper takes a short-term and regionally-focused view of history in the mid-nineteenth century, showing that the financial crisis led to distinct patterns in the exploitation of people and resources in Qing Central Asia.

Peter Lavelle is a specialist in Chinese history during the long nineteenth century. His research focuses on topics related to the environment, agriculture, science and technology, and colonialism. He is currently working on a book about Chinese agricultural science and development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His research has been supported by funding from a variety of sources, including the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies and the Fulbright Program. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Before joining the faculty at the University of Connecticut, he was a member of the History faculty at Temple University.