China if Britain is sucked into the ACW

I was at the local library leafing through the beginning of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen Platt. In it he makes two explosive claims: 1. Western intervention, and by far above all British aid, was decisive in the Qing victory, and 2. The American Civil War coincided with the decisive turning points of the Taiping war. Britain would not have been able to ramp up its efforts in the east had it interfered in the US, and the Taiping could have emerged victorious.

What if the UK intervenes in the civil war in 1861/62? What attention or resources that went to aid Qing China against the Taiping state would have went to North America instead, and how would it have affected the outcome of that war?
 
If Britain intervened in the Civil War (and that is a big if), it would have devoted most of its resources to the sea - defending its Caribbean possessions and harassing the US blockade (but probably avoiding a direct assault, at least for a while). Britain would have been very hesitant to devote any land forces to the war for multiple reasons - one, the Civil War was one of the most titanic struggles of the century; two, Britain had just concluded its involvement in the Crimean War with numerous blunders on the part of the British Army; three, Canada was worth less to the British Empire than one Caribbean island.

Chinese trade is much more valuable to British interests than Southern cotton. Given the choice, Britain would quickly negotiate a way out of the war in order to focus on China.
 
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Why can't they intervene for the US it's always assumed they support the south, well what if they put down the rebellion. Or assist the US in some way or another.
 
Why can't they intervene for the US it's always assumed they support the south, well what if they put down the rebellion. Or assist the US in some way or another.

Well, presumably it's because the UK had a benevolent neutrality towards the south during the war, and not so stellar relations with the US. Especially during the Trent Affair.
 
Canada was worth less to the British Empire than one Caribbean island.


This is a claim often made, with good justification, about Canada a century earlier.

I seriously doubt that it stands up by the 1860s. The Caribbean plantations are no longer the sole source of their luxury goods for Britain; meanwhile, the Canadian colonies are increasingly important sources of raw material for Britain's industrial heartland- and food!

Besides which, the population of Canada is far greater than it was. It's one thing for France to give up on 50, 000 New Frenchmen for the sake of Martinique. By the 1860s there are millions of British North Americans, and by the mid nineteenth century the conception of the Empire as a great expansionist project of the English race is developing. You simply can't abandon the settlers.
 
Would the butterflies alone be enough to give the Taiping victory? Some of the important battles between 1861-1866 were very close.
 
I feel like no Western support for the Qing is necessary but not sufficient for Taiping victory. A lot of the Western backing was in semi- or unofficial capacity, like the Ever Victorious Army. The Shanghai financiers will still put mercenaries in the field even without British support for Beijing.

The problem is that once the Treaties of Tianjin are signed, then the West has a stake in forcing Qing compliance- and that means Qing survival.
 
So Ward had originally intended to join the Taiping. And when the American and British communities in Shanghai were at each other's throats because of the Trent war scare, there were rumors/calls on the American side for Ward to lead an action to defend American property against the British garrison.

What if Ward flees Shanghai and defects to the Taiping while Gordon takes a command in North America?
 
Why can't they intervene for the US it's always assumed they support the south, well what if they put down the rebellion. Or assist the US in some way or another.

I mean it's not like the U.S. got most of its gunpowder from Great Britain or anything... (They did, just not with bodies).
 
You've got to avoid the Treaties of Tianjin. Once they're signed, the path to a favorable China settlement for Britain and France lies through Qing victory- and even with an American war, they can still spare the resources given they'll mainly be drawn from the Indian and Indochinese colonies.

That means avoiding the Second Opium War. It's important that you don't change the causes, just delay it. Keeping forces in China to help secure the Qing is a far less expensive proposition than assembling a full expedition in the first place, and that might not happen if Britain and France are getting involved in North America.


I still maintain though that no western support for the Qing is necessary, but not sufficient for Taiping victory. Ward and Gordon weren't supermen. In fact, the Taiping armies were already better than most of the Qing forces without their help.

What you need is slightly different Taiping leadership- God's Younger Son needs to retire to his opium and harem sooner, and focus on leaders who were not just open to the west but also and far more importantly able to do deals with the Confucian gentry.

I believe that at the end of the day it wasn't the West who beat the Taiping and it certainly wasn't the central Qing state- it was the provincial elites, manifested in people like Zeng Guofan and Li Hongxang. These were the administrators and generals who could mobilize broad coalitions against the Taiping. In Zeng's case, he was in such a strong position by the end of the war that the Imperial throne was probably his for the taking- his brothers apparently thought so.

You can't simply remove them. What you need to do is convince them that the Taiping are not an existential threat to their wealth and power, so they don't exert themselves on behalf of the Qing. And to do that you need a POD in the early-to-mid 1850s.
 
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Skallagrim

Banned
I concur heartily with @SenatorChickpea, and do believe that Platt overstates his case in Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. Of his books on Chinese history, Imperial Twilight is (in my opinion) the stronger, and in it, he actually makes the case as to why Britain, after the Opium Wars, would benefit from keeping the Qing around. Some of the claims he makes in the two books are, ultimately, mutually exclusive.

If the only POD here is (basically) "Trent War", then Britain is going to be involved in that only to the extent that it doesn't hurt their interests elsewhere. Which makes sense, because the Union doesn't just have the troops to spare to go marhing happily into Canada. So British involvement will mostly be that they send ships to break the Union blockade, impose a blockade on Union ports, and defend Confederate shipping to and from Europe. That will be enough to force the Union to come to the negotiating table on very short notice. Should this for any reason not happen (the Union leadership has collectively gone insane and enjoys being lynched by a howling mob?), and should British commitments start the threaten British interests elsewhere, Britain will drop the CSA like a brick, keep enough forces in place to defend Canada, and send the rest of its forces over to defend its more economically important interests.

This all being said: none of this would have happened, because whereas Britain was fully prepared to go this far if push came to shove over the Trent Affair, Abraham Lincoln was aware of that and wanted to avoid it at all costs. He handled it elegantly in OTL, balancing forein policy and domestic public opinion, but if the matter threatened to escalate, he'd choose peace with Britain over all other considerations.
 
If Britain intervened in the Civil War (and that is a big if), it would have devoted most of its resources to the sea - defending its Caribbean possessions and harassing the US blockade (but probably avoiding a direct assault, at least for a while). Britain would have been very hesitant to devote any land forces to the war for multiple reasons - one, the Civil War was one of the most titanic struggles of the century; two, Britain had just concluded its involvement in the Crimean War with numerous blunders on the part of the British Army; three, Canada was worth less to the British Empire than one Caribbean island.

British "blunders" in the Crimean tend to be overstated in pop history, IMHO; obviously there were blunders, mostly logistical, but given that the British army remained in fighting shape throughout the conflict, said blunders obviously weren't major enough to seriously affect the army's fighting ability.

Plus, of course, there were significant reforms both during and in the aftermath of the war which improved the army's organisation, and maintaining an army in British territory in Canada would be much easier than maintaining one in the Crimea, hundreds of miles away from friendly country.

Also, it's not as if the Union army was some unsurpassable paragon of military efficiency during the ACW, and in fact European observers tended to be quite critical of both sides' armies during the war. So I doubt the British will be scared off by the prospect of having to fight the mighty Union army.
 
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Why can't they intervene for the US it's always assumed they support the south, well what if they put down the rebellion. Or assist the US in some way or another.

Well because the Union is stronger and the UK has nothing to gain from them in a victory. The South as an independent agrarian entity weakens the Union and makes it easier for the British to deal with the Cotton trade with the CSA.

So... either no intervention at all or an intervention on the side of the CSA
 

Derek Pullem

Kicked
Donor
I concur heartily with @SenatorChickpea, and do believe that Platt overstates his case in Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. Of his books on Chinese history, Imperial Twilight is (in my opinion) the stronger, and in it, he actually makes the case as to why Britain, after the Opium Wars, would benefit from keeping the Qing around. Some of the claims he makes in the two books are, ultimately, mutually exclusive.

Western aid to Qing was negligible really and much of it was army surplus materiel which would have found its way to the Qing with or without Ward and Gordon.

A more interesting what-if is what if the Taiping managed to attract a larger contingent of Western drilled mercenaries
 
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