I'd like to learn more about Britain's role in Hong Kong and not the sanitized pro-British version I learned vaguely in school. What books or authors are considered authoritative? I do have access to a university library and academic databases, so journals/articles work too.
By the time Britain officially established dominion over Hong Kong in 1842, the East India Company's operations in China had been almost completely curtailed for the better part of a decade after the expiry of their monopoly on Anglo-Chinese trade, and essentially the entirety of commerce was now being carried out by private merchants. A key point made by Stephen Platt's Imperial Twilight (2018) is that this shift in the nature of the trade relationship, from the relatively conservative Company traders, who sought to minimise Anglo-Chinese friction, to the aggressive and confrontational private merchants, only loosely regulated by representatives of the crown, is what lay behind the pressures that led to war in 1839.
When it came to fighting the war itself, the Company was somewhat more active, insofar as Company military resources – both warships and Indian troops – fought as part of the British expeditionary force, and likely the best (or at least most complete) narrative of the actual conflict in English (albeit with a couple of flaws in the military detail) can be found in Julia Lovell's The Opium War (2011), which ties together existing scholarship on the internal political dimension of the Qing war effort with a somewhat more neutral reappraisal of the British prosecution of the war, but most importantly looks at the war's cultural legacy and how its interpretation on both sides has changed over time.
On the matter of opium, a somewhat revisionist account not so much of the trade so much as patterns of consumption can be found in Zheng Yangwen's The Social Life of Opium in China (2005), which looks at the changing role and perception of opium in Chinese society from its introduction as a medicinal drug in the 9th century, through the introduction of recreational madak smoking by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, to the explosion in Indian opium in the 19th century, and finally its prohibition under Mao.
For a somewhat more traditional counterpart, Frederic Wakeman's 'The Canton Trade and the Opium War', the fourth chapter of The Cambridge History of China, Volume 10 (1978), covers the same events, but somewhat more briefly and without the benefit of modern research on the topic.