When the Chinese stopped opium imports from Great Britain, why did they start a war over one good being banned? It seems unusual. Was it incredibly economically damaging to Great Britain, which is why they were compelled to start a war?

by sportsdude523

I am asking because it seems unusual to start a war over another country banning one of your goods from being sold in their country.

For example, it's not like Japan would start a war with a South American country if they banned imports of Nintendo Switch from Japan.

So it begs the question to me, why would Great Britain start a war over the sale of their opium being banned in China? Was there truly a compelling reason they started the war, such as China banning opium trade was very economically damaging to Great Britain? Or were they just being very imperialist in attitude and did it because they could even though it wasn't that economically damaging? Or did a few lobbyists with outsized influence in the government influence it? Or is it another reason?

EnclavedMicrostate

The name 'Opium War' creates a number of implications about the war's causes and aims, implications that are somewhat justified, but nevertheless misleading. Opium was the inciting incident in the conflict, but it was noticeably absent both from many of the discussions over going to war, and indeed in the peace negotiations, where official orders were to open an informal discussion, but not to require it as a treaty term. None of Britain's treaties with the Qing in connection with the two 'Opium Wars' stated that the Qing were to legalise the drug.

It is also worth noting that the margin was incredibly close. In April 1840, Lord Melbourne was challenged with a vote of no confidence over the question of war with China, which he survived by only 9 votes – and went on to refuse to resign despite saying he would only stay on if he had a majority of least 10. Britain did not wholeheartedly jump into war, and when Melbourne's Whig government collapsed in 1841, the Tories who had opposed the war in 1839/40 came to power on the platform that their earlier fears of an interminable conflict with China were being realised, due to the as-yet inconclusive state of the campaign.

As the Whigs were the main pro-war faction, it would be prudent to look at three particular Whig MPs who called for war in 1840, representing three distinct positions: Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary; Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, then Secretary at War; and Sir George Staunton, 2nd Baronet. Before we do though, a quick summary of key events:

  • March 1839: Lin Zexu takes up his post as Imperial Commissioner for suppressing the opium trade. He surrounds the Canton merchant quarter with armed guards until the merchants agree to hand over their opium. The merchants, who have plenty of food and whose business partners have been able to smuggle in more, opt to wait it out, but the British superintendent, Charles Elliott, offers a deal whereby the opium would be confiscated by the British government and then handed to the Qing, with Britain compensating its merchants.
  • April: First shipments of opium to Lin.
  • May: Opium destroyed in Humen harbour. Lin requires that all foreign traders sign a bond stating that they will not trade in opium on penalty of death.
  • July: Six British sailors murder a Chinese civilian in Tsim Sha Tsui on the Kowloon peninsula.
  • August: Lin demands the sailors for trial. Elliott has them tried himself, and finds five guilty and deports them back to Britain, but they are cleared of wrongdoing after arrival. News arrives at the Foreign Office of the events at Canton in March
  • September: Exchange of shots between British and Qing warships.
  • October: A group of Cabinet ministers in London debates war with China as a means of covering the costs of the opium confiscation. The Thomas Coutts arrives at Canton and signs Lin's bond. Elliott establishes a blockade against British ships until instructions arrive from home.
  • November: The Royal Saxon attempts to run the blockade at Canton and is fired upon, drawing in Qing ships. From London, Palmerston issues mobilisation orders to the Governor-General of India, Lord Auckland.
  • Jan-Feb 1840: In Parliament, increasing Tory demands for information on the government's policy on China.
  • March 1840: Information regarding the now-dispatched British expedition is leaked via a French newspaper.
  • April 1840: Attempted vote of no confidence against Lord Melbourne's government, fails by just 9 votes.

Lord Palmerston: Free Trade

The matter of free trade had featured in British approaches towards China since even before the Napoleonic Wars. The Qing decision to restrict trade with foreigners to Canton in 1757 (taken partly for security reasons and partly to streamline administrative procedure) had been resented for quite some time by the British, who in 1792 and 1816 made attempts to petition for trade to open at other ports. However, the East India Company's office in Canton and Macao had not been particularly irked at the policy, and gave only weak support to these attempts. After the failure of the Amherst mission in 1816, which was the last state attempt to open trade without force, it was largely non-EIC traders, known as 'country traders', who were the main free trade advocates. These merchants took advantage of a technical loophole in the EIC's monopoly charters, which gave it exclusive rights to trade between Britain and India, and Britain and China, but not India and China.

'Free trade', though, sliced both ways: on the one hand, there was clamouring for ports to open in China; on the other, the merchants also called for the dissolution of the East India Company's monopolies, and it lost the India monopoly in 1813 and the China monopoly in 1833. After that point, it was private firms, particularly Jardine, Matheson and Co. and Dent and Co., which were the main British contacts with China, nominally overseen by a Superintendent of Trade. In 1834, Lord Napier was superintendent, and attempted to instigate a war with China at the pressing of fellow Scotsmen William Jardine and James Matheson. Palmerston had, at this stage, tacitly conceded to the anti-war party in Britain (and fortunately, Napier died of malaria before he could do anything much more inflammatory), but seems to have been committed to free trade. When Jardine returned to Britain after retiring in early 1839, he gained the ear of Palmerston just as he had Napier, and at the Cabinet meetings of September/October, Palmerston's plans more or less repeated verbatim what Jardine and Napier had concluded back in 1834.

Palmerston's speech during the no-confidence proceedings did not solely concentrate on free trade, but it was his key point. One of his critical pieces of evidence was to be a petition from thirty London merchant houses (as to which, he left this carefully ambiguous) arguing that the Qing trade policy was stifling British private interests, and that the decision to besiege the factories and confiscate the opium had shown that in its present state, trade with China was too risky to life and property to be worth undertaking.

Lord Macaulay: National Pride

Macaulay is rather infamous for his views on the Orient, neatly encapsulated in his assertion that 'A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. Macaulay's 1828 essay History used China as a byword for backwardness – 'It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarianism to escape the fate of China', he wrote, having previously stated that:

It would be easy to indicate many points of resemblance between the subjects of Diocletian and the people of that Celestial Empire, where, during many centuries, nothing has been learned or unlearned: where government, where education, where the whole system of life, is a ceremony; where knowledge forgets to increase and multiply, and, like the talent buried in the earth, or the pound wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither waste nor augmentation.

It should not surprise us, then, that Macaulay had, at the cabinet meeting in October, been particularly keen to go to war, as a reinforcement of British (or perhaps English?) national pride in the face of the apparent insult of the Qing siege of the factory quarter:

...the first step which [Elliot] took was to order the flag of Great Britain to be taken from the boat and to be planted in the balcony... It was natural that they should look with confidence on the victorious flag which was hoisted over them, which reminded them that they belonged to a country unaccustomed to defeat, to submission, or to shame...

He also argued heavily in favour for letting Britain's 'people on the ground' decide policy, on the basis that this had enabled Britain's near-complete conquest of India (which he was a pretty direct participant in, being part of the Company government in India between 1834 and 1838). In his own view, China, like India, was a stagnant civilisation which it was Britain's right to trample over, more or less. This national pride angle was quite prominent in other pro-war speeches as well, but Macaulay stands out as the most brazen.