U.S. Involvement in Opium Trade With China

Generally, the opium trade which so negatively affected China is recalled as a British outrage. Historians Geoffrey Ward and Fredric D. Grant (1986) pointed out however, that American mercantile interests also benefited significantly from the opium trade, including a young man named Warren Delano, whose grandson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would ultimately become president of the United States. It is the purpose of this concept paper to identify, somewhat broadly, American involvement in the Indo-China opium trade and to consider the relative extent of American activity vis-a-vis that of the more dominant British. It will be argued that whereas individual American businessmen and traders profited significantly from this trade and while the United States government participated in protecting those interests to some degree, American involvement in the opium trade was far less significant than that of the British.

Historian Jonathan D. Spence (1990) offered an excellent overview of the Indo-China opium trade and stated that in the nineteenth century, the British were the dominant beneficiaries of this trade which moved opium grown in India (controlled by the British (to consumers in China via the East India Company. This British mercantile group established a monopoly for the purchase of Indian opium and then sold licenses to trade in opium to selected Western merchants known

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anton, China. The Americans did not have access to the better quality of opium that was produced in India and relied on an inferior Turkish product for their own trading activities (Langford, 1999). Ward and Grand (1986) identified opium as good for the dollar as it was for the British pound. By 1839, every American trading house in Canton handled the drug except D.W.C. Olyphant & Company which was opposed to the trade on moral grounds. Given that Chinese officials in the early nineteenth century were contemptuous of the West and considered both the British and Americans to be little more than barbarians, the attitude of the Western traders toward the devastation wrought by opium abuse and addiction may well have been a response. On their side, said Ward and Grant (1986), the American traders, including the Delano cartel, asserted that they only carried the drug and that it was the British and Turks who manufactured the opium and the Chinese who consumed it who were the true villains. Nevertheless, Ward and Grant (1986) note that American traders such as Robert Bennet Forbes were quite comfortable in following the example of England, the East India Company, and American merchants such as the Perkins, Peabodys, Russells,
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