ch with respect to the world in general and Manchu China in particular was shaped by four factors resulting from Enlightenment thought, including: 1) the Industrial Revolution belief in the necessity of human endeavor divided by God; 2) distinctive religious and secular methods for this purpose included spiritual conversion and industrialization bolstered by commerce; 3) the belief that those equipped with the proper knowledge could save nations through trade and missionary activity; and 4) the ideological theory of the so-called Just War employed against backward nations also supported the British merchants in China in this instance.
In discussing this set of military conflicts, John Newsinger states that the smuggling of opium into China despite Chinese government bans on this product, became a huge source of profits for the British by the 1830s and played "a crucial role in the financing of British rule in India and was the underpinning of British trade throughout the East." Newsinger goes on to state that:
"The production of opium in India first came under British control in the course of the eighteenth century. In the 1760s, some one thousand chests of opium (each weighing 140 lbs) were smuggled into China and this figure gradually increased to 4 thousand chests in 1800. By the 1820s the traffic in opium began to increase dramatically with over 12 thousand chests being smuggled into China in 1824, rising to 19 thousand in 1830, 30 thousand in 1835 and to 40 thousand chests (2,500 tons of opium) in 1838.The British energetically encouraged poppy growing, on occasion coercing Indian peasant farmers into going over the crop. By the end of the 1830s the opium trade was already, and was to remain, "the world's most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century."
The opium trade was of vital importance to British Imperialism at this time. It was one corner of an Eastern triangular trade that mirrored the eighte...