The Causality of Contingency: The Coming of the Mid-19th-Century Crisis in China

Yang Zhang, American University

Cause and contingency are often regarded as two opposite things in comparative historical social sciences. Scholars used to identify structural conditions/factors/variables as causes of historical change, but over the past three decades there has been a shift of intellectual interest to contingency. In this article, I instead examine how the two things are entangled: (how) can contingency be causally significant in historical change? While we no longer need to pit one against another, it is unsatisfying to attribute the causes of historical change to arbitrarily chosen contingent events. Built upon a sequential view of historical causation, my paper addresses several types of contingency—conjunctures, chances, and choices—and evaluates their causal quality and effects under different circumstances. In so doing, the paper corrects a radical view of eventful causation and omnipotent contingency, since many seemingly indeterminate but transformative events are often the encounter of otherwise loosely interconnected sequences in an unexpected but patterned way. This theory is illustrated by the sequential, iterative, and interactive formation of the mid-19th-century crisis in the Qing Empire of China, from the Christianity-inspired Taiping Revolution in the Southeast to several Muslim rebellions in the western frontiers.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 246. Uncertainty, Crises, and Critical Junctures in the Political History of China and beyond