I've not seen the HistoryMatters video (and if I did I feel there'd be a 50-50 chance of dying of an aneurysm considering my track record with these sorts of things), but I've done a fair bit of reading on the Opium Wars so I can discuss the English-language literature a bit.

The best general overview of the First Opium War, though not recommended without reservations, is Julia Lovell's The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China (2011). Lovell is a cultural historian of modern China, and her concluding chapters on the war's cultural legacies (and indeed, the invention and reinvention of the 'Opium War' and discourses thereof in China in the 20th century) are incredibly valuable reading. Her introductory chapters discussing the nature and structure of the Qing empire also succinctly summarise the revisionist conclusions that emerged following the 'New Qing' turn, particularly as regards the significance of ethnic identity and the multiplex nature of the empire. The chapters covering the buildup to war also give significant coverage to then-recent revisionist views about the impact of opium, particularly the argument about its limited social effect posited by Dikötter, Zhou and Laamann (2004), and its limited economic impact as argued by Lin (2006) – this is not unproblematic (Dikötter et al are rather polemical) but it's not fatal.

The main 'problem', insofar as one may wish to consider it to be one, is that its coverage of the war itself is basically a weaving together of two existing secondary works – the British-centric narrative of Fay (1975) and the Qing-centric narrative of Mao (1995) – with not much in the way of direct original contribution. A similar 'problem' is that her narrative of the background to war is similarly pretty much traditional and repeats existing narratives, albeit with some (not unappreciated) snarky comments about its characterisation in contemporary Chinese propaganda and some integration of perspectives from Lin and Dikötter et. al. (see above). That's not to say the book is bad, but it is to say it doesn't really try to advance our understanding of the war on the Qing side particularly far beyond what had been said in 1995, and of the British side beyond 1975. That being said, in 2011 Mao's book was not translated into English, and so it definitely did, at the time, advance the publicly-available understanding of the Qing side.

However, we live in 2021, and Mao's book received an English translation and was published as The Qing Empire and the Opium War: Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty in 2016. If you want an absolutely comprehensive view of the Qing side of the war, Mao's book is the place to go. However, it does not cover the British angle particularly well.

The other major gap by Lovell is her coverage of the war's origins, which have been pretty masterfully covered by Stephen Platt in Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (2018), which narrates the roughly four decades before the Opium War with a focus on how the British (and to a lesser extent, the Chinese) mercantile community in Canton navigated the political, economic, and ideological changes of the early nineteenth century.

In short, your best bet on the First Opium War if you're on a budget would be Lovell's book; if you have spare spending money then look at Platt's and Mao's in that order.

There are a large number of other popular-audience-aimed histories of the Opium War period, and I would recommend generally avoiding these as they are either overtly or subtly out of date: these are Jack Beeching's The Chinese Opium Wars (1975), Arthur Waley's The Opium War through Chinese Eyes (1958), and William Hanes and Frank Sanello's The Opium Wars: The Destruction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (2004). I cannot begin to stress how bad the last one is and how much it ought to be avoided.

There are a couple of more academically-inclined narrative books on the period, both rather Anglocentric: Peter Ward Fay's mouthful and a half of a title, The Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by which They Forced Her Gates Ajar (1975), and Harry Gelber's Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals: Britain’s 1840–42 War with China, and its Aftermath (2004). I have yet to read the latter but my impression from the few reviews that exist is that leans close to imperial apologia; the former seems to remain the standard narrative on the British side but is, as you can tell, nearly half a century old. Neither is particularly devoted to the Qing side.

I'll avoid recommending any narrow academic literature on the topic for the time being, but if you insist then I'd be happy to offer some suggestions there.

You'll notice that I have so far avoided the Second Opium War, or Arrow War, and that's because there really isn't a good book that covers the whole thing. I haven't read Douglas Hurd's The Arrow War (1967), which would in theory fit the bill, but, well, you can tell by the publication date that it's pretty ancient, and it is also probably Anglocentric in focus.

There are two somewhat complementary academically-inclined books by J.Y. Wong that, combined, provide a decent enough coverage. The first is Yeh Ming-Ch'en: Viceroy of Liang Kuang 1852-8 (1976), which covers the career of the south China governor-general up to his capture by British and French forces and his death in captivity in India. It's not solely focussed on the Arrow War per se – indeed, its main focus is on Ye's response to rebel movements like the Taiping and Red Turbans well before that – but it does have some of it. The second is Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China (1998), which mainly discusses the origins of the war and the dynamics of Western imperialism. It is, potentially, a bit in conflict with some modern approaches to Western imperialism that argue that ideology trumped economics and not the reverse, but it is, for the moment, the only monograph study of its kind. Unfortunately that leaves the latter half of the Arrow War – which it seems Eastern European historians like to call the 'Third Opium War' – somewhat in the lurch. Stephen Platt's Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012) covers the latter campaigns in context with the ongoing Taiping War and so I recommend that first, but it is not the primary focus. There is an alternative option in the form of Harry Gelber's Battle for Beijing, 1858-60: Franco-British Conflict in China (2016), which carries over a little of the polemic from the earlier First Opium War book, but which can be recommended somewhat more if only due to its lack of obvious competition.