For much of the twentieth century the Boxer uprising was read straightforwardly as a religious explosion: a spirit possession cult that turned its trance rituals and belief in bullet invulnerability directly against Christian missions, driven by a genuinely millenarian hostility to the foreign faith. Joseph Esherick's 1987 study, still the standard academic account of the movement's origins, reframed that reading. Working from Chinese, missionary and diplomatic archives, Esherick traced the Boxers' emergence to specific and material causes in late nineteenth century Shandong: repeated flooding and drought, disruption of traditional livelihoods along the Grand Canal as steamships and railways displaced boatmen, and mounting local resentment at the legal privileges Christian converts enjoyed under missionary protection in disputes with their non-Christian neighbors.
On Esherick's account, the movement's anti-Christian violence grew out of these grievances rather than preceding them, and its religious vocabulary, the spirit possession, the invulnerability rites, the martial societies, gave a shared, locally recognizable form to a rebellion whose roots were economic and social. The debate his work opened has not been resolved into a single consensus. Later historians have generally accepted his ecological and economic evidence while still insisting that the movement's religious character, not merely its idiom, remains central to explaining why it took the specific, violently anti-Christian shape that it did.