Question

Can you identify the groups that gained from and supported the trade in opium?

Answer 1

Opium trade, in Chinese history, the traffic that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries in which Western countries, mostly Great Britain, exported opium grown in India and sold it to China. The British used the profits from the sale of opium to purchase such Chinese luxury goods as porcelain, silk, and tea, which were in great demand in the West.

Opium was first introduced to China by Turkish and Arab traders in the late 6th or early 7th century CE. Taken orally to relieve tension and pain, the drug was used in limited quantities until the 17th century. At that point, the practice of smoking tobacco spread from North America to China, and opium smoking soon became popular throughout the country. Opium addiction increased, and opium importations grew rapidly.

Britain and other European countries undertook the opium trade because of their chronic trade imbalance with China. There was tremendous demand in Europe for Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain pottery, but there was correspondingly little demand in China for Europe’s manufactured goods and other trade items. Consequently, Europeans had to pay for Chinese products with gold or silver. The opium trade, which created a steady demand among Chinese addicts for opium imported by the West, solved this chronic trade imbalance.

The East India Company did not carry the opium itself but, because of the Chinese ban, farmed it out to “country traders”—i.e., private traders who were licensed by the company to take goods from India to China. The country traders sold the opium to smugglers along the Chinese coast. The gold and silver the traders received from those sales were then turned over to the East India Company. In China, the company used the gold and silver it received to purchase goods that could be sold profitably in England.

The relationship between British officials and the Qing government was notable in that the British were dealing with a fully-formed government of a foreign state rather than a colony of a protectorate which they already controlled. Yet the British government did not view China as a real government and diplomatic equal, but rather as an informal colony whose laws were not to be taken seriously and whose demands were an affront to the Crown. For opium merchants in Canton, the laws were made to be flouted, and the British economic interests warranted a willful disregard to the human suffering inflicted by the opium trade. This was made easier by the cultural distancing tactic of devaluing the lives of Chinese addicts, as well as the abdication of culpability to instead blame British government agents, who had condoned the trade for decades. For the British public and parliamentary officials, the justification for war was to redeem the British reputation and prestige abroad, which had been sullied by Commissioner Lin’s audacious treatment of English subjects as criminals.

The opposition’s supposed neutrality on China’s anti-opium policies and the ethics of the opium trade met with an inherent contradiction when they allowed a war that defended the opium merchants as victims instead of criminals. Ultimately, both the justifiers and the opposition to the Opium War opted for an ethnocentric presumption in the interests of their countrymen and the British reputation abroad—revealing just how deeply the vein of economic imperialism was rooted in nineteenth-century British consciousness.