According to Cody (1988), parts of China came to be part of the British Empire when the British government found themselves responsible for securing trade the routes between India and the Far East to protect their recently acquired financial interests in the East India Company. Victorian Britain had become very powerful; however, Disraeli’s imperialist foreign policy included a paternalistic and racist attitude directed toward the “primitive peoples” under their jurisdiction. This attitude, combined with the government’s ambivalence about governing their foreign acquisitions, would eventually contribute to the dissolution of the Empire due to nationalist movements in the British governed territories. Britain also exploited her colonies by controlling the industry, imports, and exports of these territories and used the colonies as a dumping ground for the increased output of British manufactories as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The Americas rebelled against this policy and as a result, this colony was lost in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This policy, however, had short-term gains in other territories (Landow, 2001a & Landow, 2001b).
Extraordinarily despite the superiority complex of Britain and the belief that the nation was responsible for civilizing and Christianizing those who were allegedly “incapable of self-government” such as the peoples of central Africa and China (Cody, 1988), Britain introduced vast quantities of opium into China. The Emperor Dao Guang resisted the trade, but British merchant traders managed to cajole and bribe their product into the country and before long, China was not only operating at a trade deficit, nearly ninety percent of men in the coastal regions were addicted. According to Allingham (2006), a British physician estimated the number of addicted to be twelve million people.
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The Opium Wars
In 1939, the Qing Emperor fought back and sent a special emissary, Lin Ze-xu, to Canton to clean up the British mess. He arrested nearly every foreign merchant and their Chinese collaborators, confiscated as much opium as he could which he publicly burned, then closed the port to all foreign merchants. Charles Eliot, the British superintendent of trade attempted to negotiate with Lin Ze-xu, but Lin was determined to carry out the Emperor’s orders. Eliot reacted by blockading the Pearl River, which was the beginning of the first Opium War. By the middle of 1942 the superior British navy had secured Shanghai and the Chinese surrendered control of the coast and the island of Hong Kong to Western forces (Allingham, 2006).
The Chinese begged the British to cease cultivating opium poppies, but Sir Henry Pottinger refused. Additionally, China was forced to reduce their import tariffs, abolish all trading monopolies, and agree to provide full legal immunity from Chinese law to all foreign merchants, known as extraterritoriality (Allingham, 2007). Allingham (2004) explains that this demand was made primarily because Chinese officials were not very even handed when dealing with foreigners and he discusses how vicious attacks had become on what the Imperial Commissioner, Yeh, called the “red-haired foreign dogs” and the rewards offered for the capture and execution of these “barbarians” and their ships.
The second Opium War broke out in 1856 when China was unable to forestall Britain’s additional demands made in 1854 to open all ports to foreign trade, legalize opium imports from British territories, and remove all tariffs from British imports. China was defeated and force to make even more humiliating concessions. When China tried to stall implementation of the terms of the treaties, they were once again attacked and defeated in 1859 (Allingham, 2006).
What started out as Britain’s desire to increase their trade profits had turned into the “partitioning of China by the Western powers” and the subjugation of China’s ancient culture and values to Western religion and Western drugs. The eventual rise of the Boxer rebellion was perhaps an inevitability as the battered Chinese fought to rid their shores of “foreign devils” (Allingham, 2006).
- Allingham, P.V. (2006). England and China: The opium wars, 1839-60. The Victorian Web.
- Allingham, P.V. (2004). The China question in Punch, January to June 1857. The Victorian Web.
- Allingham, P.V. (2007). The principle of extraterritoriality and the opium wars, 1839-60. The Victorian Web.
- Cody (1988). The British Empire. The Victorian Web.
- Landow, G.P. (2001). Ambivalence, economy, and empire in Victorian Britain. The Victorian Web.
