Fists Against Empires

A movement rooted in villages, martial ritual, and hostility to foreign influence reached the gates of imperial power and forced the world to respond. Rather than treating the Boxers as a single-minded mob, this book examines the social conditions, spiritual convictions, regional tensions, and political calculations that shaped their rise. It traces how Qing officials alternately opposed, tolerated, and supported the movement, and how foreign military intervention expanded the scale of destruction. The result is a careful history of collision: popular resistance, fragile sovereignty, missionary expansion, and imperial competition converging in northern China.