Also what was the economic organization of the Qing dynasty and how, if at all, did the Taipings seek to change it? Are there any good books in English on the events?
The essential nature of the economic programme is laid out in the Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty, which most notably set out a system of common ownership of property. Land was to be divided into nine grades depending on fertility, and then equally distributed such that each individual of 16 years of age or older, whether male or female, received the same proportion, and each individual under 15 half of that. All surplus food and money was nominally to be passed to an official in charge of a communal treasury and redistributed as needed. Said officials were supposed to be elected by the populace, and were also responsible for ensuring the exercise of religious practices, failure to do so being grounds for a communally-decided punishment.^1 ^10 This served as a stark contrast to the near-monopolisation of land by wealthy landowners who rented said land out for agriculture, and indeed this redistribution of land and resources (including to the elderly and disabled) was even noted as unusually philanthropic by Western observers in 1854.^2
The key element of the Taiping social agenda was the merger of military and civilian social structures, such that civil society was organised on military lines, with families organised into groups of powers of 5, with the smallest grouping with administrative functions appearing to be that of 25 families, for which would be provided a granary, a church and the requisite services, as well being the source and beneficiary of its own tradesmen, such as carpenters and smiths. An 'army' would ultimately consist of 13,156 families, each with a general commanding five colonels, each commanding five captains, each commanding five lieutenants, each commanding five sergeants, each commanding one corporal and four privates.^1 The military organisation was not in and of itself new – the old de jure militia system of tuanlian had likewise also used fixed numbers of families, each providing 1 man to fight – but did clash with the de facto system of baojia, which was more organically formed and based around local population sizes,^3 and of course the merger of civilian society and military organisation was immensely radical.
A temporary but nonetheless severe Taiping social policy was the segregation of male and female. Although women were given nominally equal status, for a while Taiping policy was that, since all men were brothers through God and all women were sisters, any sexual desire was inherently incestuous. Although the latter policy appears to have been unpopular enough to be dropped (and indeed the senior leadership freely flouted this policy to maintain personal harems anyway), the equal status was seized upon.^4 ^5 Indeed, a woman, Fu Shanxiang, became a senior bureaucrat under Yang Xiuqing,^6 whilst the British volunteer Augustus Lindley claimed that up to a quarter of the Taiping army was made up of women.^7
The other potentially unpopular policy was a ban on gambling, alcohol and opium on pain of death,^4 ^8 although this was similarly widely flouted. Opium smoking was no less uncommon among the Taiping than in Imperial-held areas,^9 and an Irish mercenary in Yang Xiuqing's employ, shortly before the latter's execution in 1856, noted afterwards that he was billeted with a man with a sizeable stock of rice-wine.^4 Augustus Lindley was also displeased with the heavy drinking of the American officer Henry Burgevine, recently defected from the Ever-Victorious Army after its takeover by 'Chinese' Gordon.^7 The ban on alcohol wasn't only flouted by Westerners with the Taiping, however. The aforementioned Fu Shanxiang only narrowly avoided execution after the ban was re-iterated.^6 However, the nominal prohibition was in fact so extreme that Hong Xiuquan's version of the Bible edited out any reference to righteous men consuming it.^4
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