It had a strong and peaceful government during the Qing Empire and imperial powers such as Britain and the U.S. were interested in Chinese goods. By the late 1700s, however, China was experiencing internal strains with the population and with the government (columbia.edu). China had often looked down on foreigners and did not accept their cultures, but in 1793, the Chinese emperor agreed to meet with an English ambassador. The ambassador brought with him modern gadgets of that time such as clocks and instruments (Beck 371). The emperor was not interested and then the British realized they would have to find a product to trade with China so they could balance out the trading with China; that product was opium (Beck 371).
The British government retaliated with much force, resulting in Chinese defeat, which then forth became the Treaty of Nanking. The Treaty of Nanking is labeled as one of the “Unequal Treaties” for many reasons. When Britain implemented the Treaty of Nanking, much of the life that China knew would soon be no more, the island of Hong Kong was forced over to British ownership and control, rights were taken away, tariffs implemented, and the destruction of Opium by Lin caused a six million dollar “refund” to England. Since China was a closed nation, with an old-fashioned way of life and military technology, this caused a great disadvantage for them, trying to fight against what British was doing to their country. China had no say or control to what Britain was doing to them, and no way of fighting back or retaliating.
Culturally this was also the last century before the tradition of foot binding was outlawed. Opium Wars Before the imperialist treaties, foreign trade was restricted to the Guangzhou port of Canton. At this point China was still a self-sufficient agrarian society with no demand for foreign goods. England, France, Russia, Japan, and America were the Imperialist nations requesting more trade ports to be opened, however the British Empire were the most aggressive. The British owned East India Company, was already conducting illegal Opium trade across the China Indian border.
Between 1750 and 1850 the most important colonial possession in Asia was British India. Differing from the changes that British India brought to North America, the changes that the British made in Asia did not bring political independence. The East India Company was chartered in 1600 by the crown and was quickly made into a large powerful authority. The East India Company quickly took over India’s imports and exports in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along with controlling the Chinese economy greatly with the power of opium imports. Britain operated on claims that their system was based on free trade but the practices that they followed showed anything but that.
Frank Dikotter, LaesLaamann and Xun Zhou, the authors of Drugs and Empires in chapter 2, were mainly focused on the consumption culture of opium in the Chinese society. They believed that opium use in China wasn’t the outcome of imperialism. Here are the research questions: (1) what was the consuming myth of opium? (2) How opium affected the social status of people? (3) How opium smoking progressed down the social scale during the second half of the 19th century?
On the other hand, the autarkic Chinese empire was formal, insular, economically self-sufficient and relied heavily on both bureaucracy and an ethnocentric ideology to sustain itself. While it had a sizeable army, it had not needed to demonstrate its power to a foreign enemy since the Treaty of Nerchinsk a century earlier. In order to understand the progression of the British and the humiliation of the Chinese, the ‘four sinews of power’ (Hack, 2009) and the differing roles they played at different times will be examined in historical context. It will be suggested that ultimately, the Chinese failure to appreciate the determination of the British to open China to free trade led to the loss of their sovereign ports. The initial ventures to form British settler and plantation colonies in New England, Virginia and Barbados were funded by private entrepreneurs who sometimes received financial backing by the state (Unit 5, pp.183-190).In the years preceding the Macartney mission, the British mercantilist policy aimed to secure the economic exploitation of the peripheries; trade monopolies were created and protected by legislation such as the Navigation
China was always independent and Western trade was non-existent. China had silk, tea and porcelain as trading goods but wanted nothing from the West except silver. The British used the ban of Opium in China to increase their trade and smuggled it into China. This
During this entire conflict, the European powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia) had carved up China and Africa into “spheres of influence” for themselves to keep. Although the US had just received many ports to trade with, it didn’t completely satisfy the American economy. So, naturally, the US wanted to be able to access these Asian ports, especially Hong Kong. Secretary of State John Hay dispatched his famous Open Door note, which urged the European nations to keep fair competition open to all nations willing and wanting to participate. This became the “Open Door Policy.” All the powers
Although communication between the King’s representatives and the Crown was slow Britain did react forcefully to the colonist rebellious actions. The Boston Tea Party was considered one of the earliest rebellious actions taken against the Crown. In 1767 the British government enacted the Indemnity Act, which did not last long and was replaced by the Townshend Act. The Townshend Act placed taxes on lead, glass, paper and tea. The most signification of which was the tax on tea; because the colonist drank approximately 1.2 million pounds of tea each year.
The attempt to resolve these issues by the North Ministry resulted in a revolution. (The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (2001), Library of America, 880pp) During the 17th century, the Europeans acquired a taste for tea which rival companies were created to import the tea from China. The Parliament in England, gave the East India Company the control of the importation of the tea in 1968. The Tea became very popular in the British colonies which caused the Parliament to remove foreign competition by passing a Tea Act in 1721 which required that colonies to import their tea from Great Britain and nowhere else. By law, the East India Company did not export the tea to the colonies.