Фигурка "Aliens 7" Series 1. Hicks

Moreover, those forces that later drove the expansion of the nation-state in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards — the exigencies of warfare, the need for revenue and the demand for political representation — were very different from the factors that shaped China’s imperial state. In contrast to Europe, where no state dominated, China enjoyed overwhelming power over its neighbours for more than a millennium, [244] while political representation was to remain an alien concept, even after the 1911 Revolution and the fall of the Qing dynasty. The dynamics of state-creation in China and Europe were profoundly different in almost every major respect. [245] IMPLOSION AND INVASION The problems faced by the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) began to mount in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its first taste of what lay in wait was its defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839-42). Then, around the middle of the century, as economic difficulties began to grow, the Qing were shaken by a series of local revolts together with four major rebellions: a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the south-west (1855-73), another Muslim rebellion by those of Turkic descent in the north-west (1862-73), the Nien Rebellion in the north (1853-68), and the Taiping Uprising (1850-64). [246] Of these, the Taiping was by far the most serious ...»