Conclusion

In his magisterial work, The Birth of the Modern World, the late C. A. Bayly provided an example of what a comparative analysis of subaltern resistance and rebellion might look like—not in the essentializing sense of old Marxist historiography, but within a global macro-perspective.^[1076] Bayly's prime example was the Taiping Rebellion in mid-nineteenth-century China, which lasted more than a decade, led to the death of hundreds of thousands people, and almost brought the Qing Empire to an end.

Notably, Bayly examined the Taiping Rebellion in the context of other major upheavals across the globe during the mid-nineteenth century, not least the Indian Uprising, which overlapped chronologically with events in China. In this reading, these major upheavals cannot be understood simply with reference to local circumstances but were in crucial ways shaped by global events and the circulation of ideas—especially the spread of Christianity, which influenced the syncretic beliefs of the Taiping, and in India alienated the local population and eventually provoked the uprising. This approach has been criticized for placing too much emphasis, and explanatory purchase, on global connections and networks, and yet it is suggestive of the macro-dimensions, which might appropriately be considered alongside more detailed case studies of subaltern resistance.^[1077] The global comparative approach not only serves to identify commonalities and potential linkages, it also allows differences and the specifics of historical instances of resistance to be fully contextualized. Where the likes of Hobsbawm reduced all bandits throughout the world to the same rebellious archetype, Bayly's global comparison brings into focus distinctiveness as much as it highlights similarities. At differing scales of analysis, there are accordingly multiple productive approaches to the study of subaltern resistance and rebellions.

In the twenty-first century it should be possible to write a history that adequately reflects the complexity of past experience and pays due attention to multiple perspectives: where rebels are neither criminal nor noble; where subalterns are in various ways entangled with, rather than simply opposed to, elites and the state; where identity and solidarity challenge or transcend basic notions of sociocultural and ethnic boundaries; and where resistance and rebellion are more than mere negation of existing structures of authority. In this chapter, the concept of the subaltern has been used, not to refer to a valorized social position and primary identity, but as a critical shorthand for those people and groups who were historically involved in resistance and rebellion and whose voices and perspectives can only be approached in a circumscribed manner. Subalterns, as we have discussed them, are thus the historical actors whose beliefs and actions cannot, or ought not, simply be yoked to a narrative of class struggle or proto-nationalism. In that sense, an approach focused on subalternity can be deployed as more of a methodological strategy of reading the past than a political stance in the present.^[1078] While this may to some seem to be a contradiction in terms, a deliberately non-ideological appropriation of the methodology has the benefits of rendering the undisputed insights and sophistication that the subalternist project represents available to a broader range of scholars—and applicable to a broader set of historical inquiries.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

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