Abstract

"Aswim in a Sea of Poppies: Opium Competition and the Limits of English Empire, 1790-1840"

Hagar Zheng Gal, Harvard University (hagargal@g.harvard.edu)

Few historical episodes cast greater shadow on the relationship between business, government and public interest than the opium trade between Britain and the Qing Empire. To historians, opium is the economic instrument by which the British state, partnering with British business, achieved imperial dominance over Asia for the benefit of the British public. In Chinese memory, it was “the Opium War of 1840 [by which] China was…reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society” (Xi Jinping, 2021). Contemporary British working class admonished “merchants of England…the wealthy sons of the wealthiest of mothers” for advancing their “interests of the opium trade with China” at the expense of producers of “printed muslins of Lancashire, and…hardware of Birmingham and Sheffield” (UK Ragged School Industrial Institution, 1858). Late Qing literati lamented the “immense mansion that has weathered a thousand years [while] those in the mansion remain blissfully indifferent; drinking, playing and sleeping” – warped in opium smoke (梁启超, 1896).
To historians, the exponential growth of the trade reflects a specific relation between business and government: the monopoly granted to the East India Company over British trade with Asia. In this narrative, the monopoly allowed the Company to ever expand the opium market in China and production in India, a process of one-sided domineering culminating in the First Opium War which forced the Qing state to open its borders to the drug.
While the destruction wrought on Indian cultivators and Chinese consumers by the trade can hardly be questioned, this account, I claim, is inaccurate. Using data from price currents, commercial reports and private business correspondences, I argue that the opium trade’s boom was not a methodical accomplishment of the Company’s monopoly, nor an expression of British hegemony in Asia. It was, rather, a product of the Company’s failed scramble to suppress its competitors – self-titled “free traders” – and exert control over the trade between 1790-1840. The Opium War was, in fact, a sign of the political force amassed by the free traders and the downfall of the Company and the mercantilism it represented.