The Opium War: Drugs, dreams and the making of China

WARS WITHOUT END

Name of the book: The Opium War: Drugs, dreams and the making of China

Name of the writer: By Julia Lovell,

Publisher: Picador

Price: Rs 499

Julia Lovell’s book opens afresh the “shameful story” of the 19th-century Opium War, which has not yet slipped out of Chinese memory. What emerges is “why” and “how” it happened at all. Was it only because of unstable relations between the Chinese rulers and the foreign merchants trying to operate in and around mainland China? Part of the answer appears to lie in a reciprocal relationship between Chinese tea and Indian opium, with the British as the driving force behind the trade and the war.

Lovell observes,“by the 1780s, Britain was running up a serious trade deficit: while China’s government was quite happy to service the growing British tea addiction, it seemed to want little except silver in return. As East India Company profits failed to offset the costs of rule in India, the British tea-drinkers pushed Asia trade figures further into the red”. But Chinese consumers had taken to Indian opium the way Londoners had taken to Chinese tea. After 1833, when the free trade lobby ended the East India Company’s monopoly on tea, the market was flooded by merchants looking to profit from tea, offering opium as barter. Not surprisingly, the British soon made money and it was in Bengal, especially Calcutta, that the drug was shipped and auctioned.

But this soon led to the “corrupting effects of a booming drug culture”, the secret actors of which were a crew of merchants from London. These businessmen “were joined by the Protestant missionary community”. The London Missionary Society had sent one Robert Morrison to China as far back as 1807. These “missionaries became natural allies of the smugglers”.

Lovell’s book combines erudition with a comprehensive perspective. She offers a lucid analysis of Qing China’s interactions with the outside world, of “the miscalculations of the Chinese court’s anti-opium lobby; the mutual incomprehension that pushed both sides towards war” and of “the opportunistic hypocrisy of the British”. She also explores the “Opium War myth”, which has endured in both Beijing and Britain for 170 years.

The actions and attitudes of the British leading up to the wars stand out for their sheer brazenness. For instance, when William Napier was appointed “to maintain a legal trade financed by illegal drug imports” and became Britain’s official resident in China, he vowed to “blast China into submission”. Arrogance, coupled with contempt for the Chinese, made him declare: “The Empire of China is my own”. One can hardly criticize modern China’s view of the West after this.

In China today, the Opium War is the traumatic inauguration of the country’s modern history. It is thought to be the main “cause of all their country’s troubles”. It has certainly cast a long shadow over Sino-Western relations and both sides appear to have “tampered with the historical record for their own purposes”.

Lovell notes that the “refusal to look at matters from the perspective of the Chinese state’s own prerogatives helped drive Britain towards war in the nineteenth century, and risks pushing relations towards confrontation in the early twenty first”. There seems to be a subtle softening towards the Western stand on China in the 19th century. Nevertheless, the role of British imperialism in the war is highlighted in the book. India’s position in this saga could have been elaborated a bit more in this otherwise enjoyable and readable book.

ABHIJIT BHATTACHARYYA

Published on November 25, 2011