Analysis of 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 รป 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 of `the Confucian Renaissance under the Manchus, discounted doctrinairism in the belief that this had caused the Ming dynasty to fall, valued reason and rejected the idea that trade could elevate human society. Merchants in Confucian China were viewed as limited people, ranked with the lower levels of society, self-seekers who put material gain above scholarship and the spiritual."
From the British perspective, said Marchant, the foreign policy approa...