Saw a comment thread on a site many scientists contribute to and wanted to check with a historian for accuracy.
The claims:
The correlation of the rise of Europe/US and the decline of China/India (55% of world gdp at the time) is directly tied to a massive amount of illegal drugs pumped by US/England/France into China for a 100 year period.
The reaction of a society to a forced drug epedemic will create 2nd and 3rd order effects (like a closed society) that are very easy to criticize today by people who are unaware of one of the largest poisonings in modern history (done by Roosevelts and Forbes family)
... colonizing all of Africa, South America, India, and drugging China (at about the same time) did a lot to boost GDP...
Industrial revolution works even better if all prevailing exporters all of a sudden fall off a cliff.
"Mean reversion", word of the century.
Interesting bonus fact for economic historians, in 1890, 30% of Britain's GDP was illegal opium smuggling to China.
Would be interesting to see the numbers for the USA (by some accounts, the biggest exporter by that point)...
Screen cap of full original post: https://i.imgur.com/QVr0UdR.png
Sources from original post:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_%26_Company
The premise of this statement rests on five elements, at least as far as economics are concerned (social issues are a different kettle of worms):
All of these can be refuted.
The first of these points, that the opium trade damaged the Chinese economy, simply does not line up with the facts. From the 1820s onwards, opium imports rose annually (see this table),^1 yet China ran up a trade surplus from the mid-1850s until 1886,^2 by which point domestic opium production was outstripping imports.^3 Indeed, domestic production of opium proved vital to the recovery of local economies, bankrolling both anti-rebel and reconstruction efforts from the 1850s to the end of the 1880s.^2 ^3 At the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1945, 40% of the revenues in China's Communist-held regions originated from so-called 'special product'.^4
The second, that the opium trade was for Western profit, is again questionable. For sure, opium exports from British India increased markedly from the 1820s onwards, but had remained generally stable at 4000 ± 1000 chests before then. As early as 1719, it was known that opium fetched a high price in China – Daniel Defoe's sequel to Robinson Crusoe sees the titular character taking the good to Macao from India,^5 and so if the opium trade was a deliberate way of gaining profit, the EIC would likely have been increasing exports long before. Instead, opium trading was merely intended to cover the costs of imports, making up for a deficit originating from declining demand for Indian cotton.^6 Further, when opium was most valuable, it was also an extremely risky venture. James Matheson, one of the most successful opium traders, faced bankruptcy more than once due to frequent price fluctuations before the end of the EIC monopoly.^7
The third, that the West desired an opium trade, is more contentious. Sure, those who gained direct profits (traders like Jardine and Matheson being chief among them) were keen to emphasise the innocuousness of opium smoking and the legitimacy of the trade,^7 but back home, people were far less kind. One Irish newspaper in 1841 denounced the British casus belli for the First Opium War, ridiculing the lack of a new Anglo-Chinese deal.^8 The terms of the Treaty of Nanjing were designed largely to render the opium trade obsolete through the opening of new ports, and pro-war agitators often then went on the condemn opium trading and call for the cession of Indian opium production.^9
The fourth, that the opium trade was purely a case of opium being produced by the West for consumption in China, is patently false. Aside from the fact that China was producing opium domestically, drugs in general were being sold over-the counter all over Britain. High street shops stocked huge quantities of laudanum (opium tincture) for consumption by polite British society in the 1860s,^10 and even at the turn of the 20th century, various narcotics could be procured over-the-counter on both sides of the Atlantic, including hashish derivatives and morphine.^11 The actual exchange was not actually as clear-cut as the standard narrative claims.
The fifth, that there was some kind of deliberate anti-Chinese conspiracy, is what it is – a conspiracy theory, and not a very good one at that. Opium had been recognised in China as a medicine since the 8th century, gained some recognition as a recreational narcotic in the 11th, and became actively used recreationally when it supplanted tobacco in the 18th.^12 The Anglo-Chinese opium trade, however, didn't take off until, as noted before, the 1820s. Aside from that, there was (and to some extent still is) a general lack of consensus as to whether opium has appreciably life-damaging side effects at all – and, given the relatively moderate nature of opium usage, it is likely that few people in China were actually that badly affected by it.^13 ^14 Further, this does not gel at all with Western policy in China. When dealing with the Taiping, for example, the decision to either intervene or remain neutral depended largely on which would be more beneficial to China, not what would better enable their own conquest of it.^15
So in conclusion, no. The opium trade, whilst certainly part of the Western imperial enterprise in China, was never part of a grand destructive conspiracy. I'm in no way trying to justify it – few at the time did, either – but I am pointing out that it was probably far less devastating than it is usually made out to be.
Sources, Notes and References:
