The formative period of the Taiping is far from under-studied, but the hard analytical part is somewhat scattered. Here, I will not be able to do the period much justice compared with Jonathan Spence's magnificent God's Chinese Son (1996), a very readable narrative history that spends more or less the first half discussing the social, economic and political context of south China, the life of Hong Xiuquan, the emergence of the God-Worshipping Society and its morphing into the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. I must admit to one or two personal reservations, related principally to my own, embryonic research into a couple of key Taiping texts, but that's neither here nor there: regardless of those caveats it is fantastic and well worth a read once you're done here.

But Spence is not the only historian to have written on the Taiping. The first serious attempt in English to approach the question of what led to the Taiping War, Frederic Wakeman's Strangers at the Gate (1966), had methods and conclusions that were considered quite bold at the time. Wakeman's overall argument posits that the Taiping emerged out of the disruption caused by the Opium War, which had two principal effects: firstly, it emboldened local peasants to take matters of defence in their own hands; and secondly, the gradual transfer of much of Guangdong's commercial infrastructure to Shanghai created substantial unemployment that created a breakdown in social order in the hinterlands and the rise of banditry, which the Taiping were able to harness. But there is much reason to question this old model, if we place it in the context of historiographical developments.

Most American historians of China in the post-WW2 period tended to approach modern Chinese history in terms of a fundamental paradigm shift beginning with the Opium War with Britain in 1839/40, which in effect ended 'traditional' China and sparked a continual confrontation with, depending on approach, either 'the West' (however vaguely defined), argued to be the locus of historical dynamism unlike the unchanging Orient, or the concept of 'modernity' (also however vaguely defined). The 1980s saw a transition towards the 'China-centric' model, which discarded the trope of the static Orient in favour of recognising China's own internal dynamics, and argued against the hard boundary of 1840, instead highlighting continuities despite the intrusion of Western imperialism. In turn, the 1990s saw the emergence of the 'New Qing' paradigm, which much more strongly highlighted the discontinuity represented by the Qing state specifically, and led to a re-evaluation of a number of aspects such as religion and ethnicity that previous discussions of Qing history tended to overlook.

Why all this discussion? To put it succinctly, Wakeman's thesis is rooted in the postwar paradigm of seeing China's recent history as one of confrontation and/or competition with Western powers and ideas that fundamentally ruptured any prior continuities. While his book is focussed on the interior dynamics that led from the Opium War to the Taiping uprising, a rather radical shift in unit of analysis for its time, it also operates on the assumption that the Opium War did lead to the Taiping uprising. What is not accounted for is the extent to which local conditions may already have been tending towards revolt in the first place.

The question of whether the Taiping were the product of longer-term factors stretching before the Opium War would be approached by Philip A. Kuhn in his groundbreaking Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China (1970), in which he pointed back to the end of the eighteenth century, when the White Lotus revolt precipitated the gradual disintegration of Qing local government and the parallel rise of banditry and secret societies on the one hand, and local militias – technically unauthorised – on the other. The Opium War was significant insofar as it accelerated an already ongoing process of local government collapse. The Taiping just so happened to be a force particularly capable of capitalising on a set of circumstances that was almost certain to lead to open revolt sooner or later.

But why were they so capable? Joseph Esherick, in his 1986 monograph The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, used the Taiping as a point of comparison in terms how how to approach questions of religious doctrine and their impact on society and politics. The key thrust was pointing out that a religious doctrine on its own does not have inherent appeal. It has appeal to particular people, and it can morph to better suit its conditions. Esherick specifically highlights the Taiping leadership's recognition of performances of spirit possession by two of its members, Yang Xiuqing (who claimed to channel the voice of God) and Xiao Chaogui (who claimed to channel the voice of Jesus), playing into local folk religious currents in order to achieve greater appeal.

Esherick was not, however, focussed on the Taiping. A more in-depth consideration of the Taiping's origins came in the form of Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son in 1996, which situates the emergence of the God-Worshipping Society within the full context of social and religious trends in rural Guangxi province. Aside from the willingness of the Taiping leadership to accommodate the inclusion of specific local folk practices, Spence points out that Hong Xiuquan's interpretation of his own visions and of the Christian texts he encountered was shaped by a well-established tradition of Buddhist eschatological texts that circulated widely in southern China, marking the Taiping not as merely alien, but rather as rooted in a common strand of thinking among people in coastal south China. In addition, he expands upon the specifically ethnic aspects of the uprising which most prior historians generally only alluded to. Hong spent most of his early years focussed on the minority Hakka group, prejudice against whom by the majority Punti led to their increasing social and economic marginalisation. The God-Worshipping Society started out as a specifically pro-Hakka protection group, and through this targeted appeal was able to substantially expand its scope in a relatively short space of time, before gradually morphing into a more generally pro-Han movement against the Manchus.

But that does not tell the full story. Because while a focus on the early Taiping can help explain why they were so successful at mobilising Hakkas in Guangxi, it leaves certain questions unanswered, particularly as regards their later core territory on the Lower Yangtze. Why were the Taiping able to mobilise supporters there so successfully as well? This remains somewhat unanswered, but Thomas H. Reilly's The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Religion and the Blasphemy of Empire (2004) offers a partial explanation in discussing the means by which the Taiping syncretised Christianity with the classical Chinese tradition. The Taiping conceptualised themselves not as a radical break from China's past, but rather a triumphant return to past glories, interpreting the Abrahamic God (上帝 shangdi as translated in Protestant texts) and the head of the pre-Confucian pantheon (上帝 shangdi) as one and the same, and the older classical canon (the Five Classics, but not the Four Books) and the Bible as compatible, indeed complementary textual traditions. While the wider social and political implications of this are not detailed at length by Reilly, this approach of seeing the Taiping in terms of continuities as well as ruptures goes a long way towards explaining their appeal.