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the prophetic Taiping Rebellion led to one of the world's bloodiest civil wars

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reflected also the destitution that swept across China in the middle of the 19th century

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but poverty and hunger, two of the most proximate causes of this upheaval, are not mere happenstance

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except for e.g. unexpected climactic shocks

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but on the scale and at the sustained level of what it was in the mid 19th century China

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there are more structural, embedded reasons of why people would move toward this kind of violence

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difficulty empire faced opening up new frontiers

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population moving

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a trap called the Malthusian trap

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that population can or will outgrow the means to feed itself, the result being widespread famine

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increasing weakness of the Qing state

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unable to face the pressure from outsiders

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the intersection of political and economic factors

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Taiping Rebellion

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called for a new order

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also called for the restoration of an old order

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why in the course of the 19th century did we see so many widespread, massive upheavals around the globe at roughly the same time?

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similar prophetic movements in Mexico

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1840s Mayan villagers rising up against the Mexican state

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in America

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War of 1812

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Tecumseh

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prophetic leader of a back country movement

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allied himself with the British

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leaders of these movements delivered a prophetic vision as Moses did

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prophetic drive to deliver people from bondage

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even in Europe

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farmers losing their lands

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artisans losing jobs to factory workers

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revolutions of 1848

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1840s upheaval around the globe

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Karl Marx

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foresaw many of these revolutions

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a prophetic figure in many senses

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argued that there was something systemic happening

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these revolutions had to do with a the new set of economic laws

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his theory of capitalism

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he and others were seeing major changes around them and were arguing for a hinge in world history

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thought that these upheavals were the beginning of a movement that would bring the capitalist system down

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called it the proletarian revolution

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he was mistaken in a significant way

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the people who were taking to the streets in 1848 in Paris, for example, were not the proletariat, or the factory workers, they were rather the losers in the transitions, i.e. the artists and the farmers

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so Marx went back to revisit his theory and came back to it in the 1850s

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globally

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in the mid 19th century, there was a growing discontent to the emerging world order

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while they bear important common traits, a significant historical question is: what accounted for the simultaneity of these eruptions?