Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War

241 Pages·2017·2.72 MB·English

by  Song-Chuan Chen

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Merchants of War and Peace challenges conventional arguments that the major driving forces of the Oe
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First Opium War were the infamous opium smuggling trade, the defence of British national honour , i
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war was started by a group of British merchants in the Chinese port of Canton in the 1830s, known
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as the ‘Warlike party’. Living in a period when British knowledge of China was growing rapidly, the
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Warlike party came to understand China’s weakness and its members returned to London to lobby for r
intervention until war broke out in 1839.
However, the Warlike party did not get its way entirely. Another group of British merchants known in
Canton as the ‘Pacifi c party’ opposed the war. In Britain, the anti-war movement gave the confl ict its
infamous name, the ‘Opium War’, which has stuck ever since. Using materials housed in the National
Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library,
SOAS Library, and Cambridge University Library, this meticulously researched and lucid volume is a
new history of the cause of the First Opium War.
Song-Chuan Chen (PhD, Cambridge) is an assistant professor S
at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. He specializes o
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Merchants of War and Peace

Merchants of War and Peace
British Knowledge of China in the Making
of the Opium War
Song-Chuan Chen
Hong Kong University Press
Th e University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
www.hkupress.org
© 2017 Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 978-988-8390-56-4 (Hardback)
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any infor-
mation storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound by China Translation & Printing Services Ltd. in Hong Kong, China
To my parents
獻給我的父母：陳雄飛　王鳳英

Contents
Prologue viii
Map of the Pearl River Delta in the 1830s x
1. Introduction 1
2. Th e Warlike and Pacifi c Parties 11
3. Breaking the Soft Border 38
4. Intellectual Artillery 61
5. A War of Words over ‘Barbarian’ 82
6. Reasoning Britain into a War 103
7. Th e Regret of a Nation 126
8. Conclusions: Profi t Orders of Canton 150
Acknowledgements 161
Notes 163
Glossary 193
Bibliography 196
Index 222
Prologue
Th e Opium War’s fi rst shots were fi red on 4 September 1839 by the British navy
under orders from Captain Charles Elliot directed at three Qing imperial warships
in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong. With a desire to explain himself, Elliot reported the
encounter to Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston:
I opened fi re from the pinnace, the cutter, and the other vessel, upon the
three junks. It was answered both from them and the battery, with a spirit not
at all unexpected by me, for I have already had experience that the Chinese are
much under-rated in that respect. Aft er a fi re of almost half-an-hour against
this vastly superior force, we hauled off from the failure of our ammunition;
for I already said, anticipating no serious results, we had not come in prepared
for them.1
Th e confi scation in March that year by Commissioner Lin of opium smuggled into
China by British merchants had created a tense atmosphere, and this partly explains
why the underprepared Elliot fi red at the Qing warships.
But was this really the fi rst shot? Historians who have taken the exchange of
fi re as the war’s starting point have tended to argue that the opium smuggling trade
was the cause and the confi scation the trigger.2 Another group of historians who argue
that the war’s purpose was to defend British national honour or to expand British
trade have dated the war’s starting point as June 1840, when British expedition troops
arrived in Chinese waters.3
However, though a captain on the frontier may give the order and a soldier of an
expeditionary force load and fi re the cannon, a war does not necessarily start with
military action. Given that this was the very fi rst war between China and a European
country, one may well ask where the idea came from of waging a war against a country
that was more than 5,000 miles away and about which most Britons knew very little.
Who made the decision and who was to benefi t from the war? Perhaps more impor-
tantly, how did the decision makers justify the acts of aggression and violence?
Th e short answer is that Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston was the key politician
behind the war decision made in a cabinet meeting on 1 October 1839. But how did
Palmerston come to make the recommendation? He was yet to receive Elliot’s report
Prologue ix
when the cabinet met that day, and prior to 1837 he had seen China as a faraway
country of negligible interest. His idea of engaging with China through war came
from a group of British merchants trading in the Chinese port of Canton.
Having sustained extensive contact with the Chinese and knowing Qing China
far better than any other Europeans, British merchants in Canton in the decade prior
to the Opium War fought a fi erce war of words among themselves on the question
of whether to ask their government to take military action against China. A group of
them then went back to Britain in 1835 and again in 1839 to campaign publicly and
to lobby politicians. Th ese merchants made politicians in London see the benefi ts of
military action; together they started the war.
To wage a war, one had fi rst to justify it. Th e war did not begin with soldiers
and captains, but with the merchants, and it commenced with a clash over British
knowledge of China. Th is book documents the development of the war arguments in
Canton and London, and charts how the merchants and politicians came to believe
they had a just war on their hands.