The Opium Wars and British China
The Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 were the most consequential wars in the history of the British presence in China. The wars were fought by the British to force the Qing Empire to open its ports to British trade, and they were won by the British in two decisive campaigns. The terms imposed on China — the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the Treaties of Tientsin in 1858, the Convention of Peking in 1860 — produced a system of “unequal treaties” that shaped the relations between China and the Western powers for the next century. The Opium Wars have been the subject of more historical controversy than almost any other episode in the history of European expansion. The trade in opium, in particular, has been a source of intense moral and political controversy, and the British role in it has been a major theme in the historiography of the British Empire.
The Opium Trade
The opium trade was, in the most immediate sense, the cause of the First Opium War. The British East India Company had been trading with China since the late eighteenth century, but the trade was, in its early decades, heavily in China’s favour. The Chinese had little interest in buying British goods, and the British had to pay for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain with silver. The result was a chronic drain of silver from Britain to China, and a serious problem for the British balance of payments.
The solution to the silver drain was opium. The British had been trading in Indian opium since the seventeenth century, and the East India Company had developed a substantial opium monopoly in Bengal. The opium was sold at auction in Calcutta, and it was then smuggled into China by British and Indian merchants, in defiance of the Chinese prohibition on the import of opium. The trade grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century, from perhaps 1,000 chests a year in the 1790s to more than 30,000 chests a year in the 1830s. The trade was enormously profitable. The British, in effect, were using Indian opium to pay for Chinese tea.
The Chinese government, concerned about the social consequences of opium addiction, attempted to suppress the trade. The first major anti-opium edict was issued in 1800, and a series of further edicts in the 1820s and 1830s attempted to enforce the prohibition. The most famous of the Chinese anti-opium officials was Lin Zexu, who was appointed imperial commissioner in March 1839 with the task of suppressing the trade in Canton. Lin was a serious and determined official, and he adopted a hard line. He blockaded the foreign factories in Canton, confiscated the opium stocks of the British merchants, and destroyed some 1,200 tons of opium in Humen in March 1839.
The First Opium War (1839–1842)
The British response to Lin’s actions was war. The British merchants in Canton had been calling for a strong response, and the British government, led by Lord Palmerston, was prepared to use military force to defend the opium trade. The British expedition to China in 1840 was a substantial operation, with some 4,000 troops and a powerful naval squadron under Admiral George Elliot. The British naval superiority was decisive: the British steam-powered gunboats could operate in the rivers and shallow waters of the Chinese coast, and the Chinese junks were no match for them.
The war was fought on three fronts: in the Canton region in the south, in the Yangtze valley in central China, and along the coast. The British captured Canton in March 1841, and they occupied the island of Hong Kong in January 1841. The British advance up the Yangtze in the summer of 1842 produced a Chinese collapse. The Battle of Chinkiang on 21 July 1842, the capture of Nanking, and the British threat to the Grand Canal produced the Chinese decision to negotiate. The Treaty of Nanking, signed on 29 August 1842, was the first of the “unequal treaties” that would shape the relations between China and the Western powers for the next century.
The Treaty of Nanking and the Unequal Treaties
The Treaty of Nanking was a substantial document. The treaty ceded the island of Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity; opened five ports — Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai — to British trade; abolished the old system of trade through the Cohong merchants in Canton; established a fixed tariff on imports and exports, which the Chinese could not alter without British consent; and provided for most-favoured-nation treatment, by which any concessions that China made to other powers would automatically apply to Britain. The treaty also imposed a war indemnity of $21 million on the Chinese, to be paid over three years.
The Treaty of Nanking was followed by a series of supplementary treaties, the most important of which was the Treaty of the Bogue of October 1843, which provided for most-favoured-nation treatment in explicit terms and established the system of extraterritoriality by which British subjects in China were tried under British, not Chinese, law. The system of extraterritoriality, the most-favoured-nation clause, and the fixed tariff became the three principal features of the “unequal treaties” that governed the relations between China and the Western powers until the 1940s.
The Second Opium War (1856–1860)
The Second Opium War, also known as the Arrow War, was provoked by a series of incidents in the early 1850s. The most important was the Arrow incident of October 1856, in which Chinese officials boarded a Chinese-owned ship that had been registered as a British vessel and lowered its British flag. The British consul, Harry Parkes, demanded an apology and was refused. The British bombardment of Canton in late October 1856 began the war. The French joined the war in 1857, in retaliation for the execution of a French missionary in Guangxi in February 1856, and the British-French expedition to China in 1858 was a substantial operation.
The Treaties of Tientsin, signed in June 1858, were the principal products of the second war. The treaties opened eleven more ports to Western trade, allowed the establishment of foreign legations in Beijing, permitted the free movement of Christian missionaries in the interior of China, and provided for the legalisation of the opium trade. The ratification of the Treaties of Tientsin in Beijing produced a new crisis. The British-French expedition of 1860, which marched on Beijing, captured the city, and destroyed the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) in retaliation for the murder of European prisoners, was the climax of the second war. The Convention of Peking of October 1860 confirmed the Treaties of Tientsin, ceded the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain, and imposed a further war indemnity of $8 million on the Chinese.
The Aftermath
The Opium Wars and the unequal treaties produced a profound shift in the relations between China and the Western powers. The system of unequal treaties, in effect, gave the Western powers a privileged position in China that was not available to the Chinese. The most-favoured-nation clause, in particular, ensured that any concession that China made to one Western power would automatically apply to all the others. The system, in this respect, was a collective Western system, not a specifically British system, and it was the system that governed the Western presence in China until the 1940s.
The opium trade, in the meantime, continued to grow. The legalisation of the trade by the Treaties of Tientsin produced a further expansion: the import of opium to China rose from perhaps 50,000 chests a year in the 1850s to more than 80,000 chests a year in the 1880s. The Chinese government attempted to suppress the trade in the 1900s, and the British government, in response to international pressure and the changing moral climate, agreed to reduce the Indian opium exports in 1906. The trade was finally suppressed in the 1910s, but the social consequences of the opium trade, in the form of widespread addiction in the Chinese coastal cities, persisted for decades.
The Moral Question
The Opium Wars have been the subject of intense moral and historical controversy. The British role in the wars, in particular, has been a major theme in the historiography of the British Empire. The British fought the wars, most directly, to defend the opium trade — a trade that the British government had been, in effect, promoting through the East India Company’s monopoly and through the British refusal to suppress the smuggling.
The contemporary British debate over the war was substantial. The Quaker MP John Bright led the opposition to the war in Parliament, and the Manchester School of Richard Cobden and John Bright argued that the war was unjust. The most famous statement of the moral case against the war was the 1840 speech of the liberal politician William Gladstone, who was then a young MP. Gladstone described the war as “unjust and iniquitous” and called on the British government to disavow the action. The British press, however, generally supported the war, and the British public, with some notable exceptions, was largely indifferent to the moral question.
The historiographical debate has continued since. The traditional British historiography, of which the work of W. C. Costin and the contributors to the Cambridge History of China is representative, treated the wars as a regrettable but necessary consequence of the British need to trade with China. The Chinese nationalist historiography, of which the work of the Chinese historians Lin Hsiao-ting and the contributors to the Cambridge History of China (the Chinese-published volumes) is representative, treated the wars as a fundamental injustice. The most recent scholarship, of which the work of Julia Lovell, James Polachek, and the contributors to The Opium War and the International System (the volume edited by the late Hans van de Ven and the work of the British historian Robert Bickers) are representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. The wars were, on this more recent view, the consequence of a complex set of political, economic, and cultural pressures, and the British role in them was, in important ways, a result of the British state’s dependence on the Indian opium revenue and on the British manufacturers’ interest in the China market.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the Opium Wars has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older British tradition, of which the work of Peter Ward Fay, W. C. Costin, and the early volumes of the Cambridge History of China is representative, treated the wars as a regrettable but necessary consequence of the British need to trade with China. The Chinese nationalist tradition, of which the work of the People’s Republic of China historians is representative, treated the wars as a fundamental injustice that the Chinese people would eventually correct. The most recent scholarship, of which the work of Julia Lovell, James Polachek, Hans van de Ven, and the contributors to The Opium War and the International System are representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. The wars, on this more recent view, were the consequence of a complex set of political, economic, and cultural pressures, and the British role in them was, in many ways, a result of the British state’s dependence on the Indian opium revenue and on the British manufacturers’ interest in the China market. The most recent work, of which the work of the British historian Timothy Brook and the American historian Stephen Platt in Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (the Taiping Rebellion volume) is representative, has situated the Opium Wars in the broader context of the Chinese nineteenth-century crisis, and has insisted on the active Chinese response to the Western intrusion.