Hello everyone!
I am looking for suggestions for a non-fiction book on the Opium Wars. I have done some research here, but couldn't find what I was looking for.
Basically something with as neutral a point of view as possible. I wouldn't mind something written as a story, and would actually prefer that to a dry textbook. (Think Barbarians at the Gates, Den of Thieves, etc.)
Thank you in advance for your help!
It's not the sole focus of the book, but the Second Opium War has a key place in Stephen Platt's book on the contemporaneous Taiping Civil War, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. The book has a great kind of novelistic style, shifting between serious scholarship and prose poetry depending on the situation.
As a side point, I don't think the Opium Wars together are really suited for the kind of project you're looking for; they take place almost twenty years apart, after all, and the world situation is very different in 1839 and 1859.