The Nineteenth Century Opium Wars

Military historian John Brown has stated that "the Opium Wars had their roots in mutual incomprehensibility of East and West." The Chinese regarded all other nations as little more than vassal or tributary states û an attitude that extended to their treatment of even the highest Western foreign officials. Such an attitude was intolerable to the British, not only because of its offense to their pride, but also "as an obstacle to the regularization of trade between the two countries. And for industrializing Britain, trade was of vital importance. Thus, Eastern and Western national destinies were on a collision course." The thesis addressed herein, therefore, is that for the British the Opium Wars were undertaken not merely in defense of British subjects and their property, but also to ensure that British capitalism would be unhampered by Chinese laws.

The end result of this conflict was the Opium Wars. As described by Leslie Marchant:

"The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, and the later Cold War that resulted in the 1876 Chefoo Convention, were doctrinal in origin. They involved, on the one side, a European power driven by a doctrine of action -- the belief that free trade and the internationalisation of commerce would create wealth for all nations, and the utopian idea that this would produce a new peaceful world order -- and, on the other, protectionist China under a literati which, in the light

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ject the opium trade. According to Bernstein, Palmerston's policy was not passive and was in fact, a direct result of pressures brought to bear in Great Britain by the powerful trade associations. For Great Britain, the Opium Wars were in many ways a direct consequence of British insistence on importing opium into China. British companies on Chinese soil engaged in the trade systematically, corrupting or intimidating Chinese authorities throughout the 1820s so that the trade continued with little interruption. Depot ships were anchored off the coast of China and the drugs were sold to Chinese smugglers who carried ashore for distribution. By the 1830s, the scale of the problem "forced the Chinese government to respond: the country was being drained of silver to pay for the opium, its administration was being corrupted by foreigners, and the extent of addictionà was seen as a threat to both state and society." Chinese officials were worried not only about the threat posed by opium addiction, but also by fears of European imperialism and the threat that imperialist British capitalists would ultimately colonize and come to dominate China herself. The Chinese emperor is said to have been shocked by the British occupation
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Approximate Word count = 2690
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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