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It is a little known fact that during the reign of Queen Victoria, the British capitalist state was the largest drug pusher the world has ever seen. The smuggling of opium into China was by the 1830s a source of huge profits, played a crucial role in the financing of British rule in India and was the underpinning of British trade throughout the East. This is one of those little historical details that are often overlooked in the history books where the opium trade is either played down or ignored altogether. Most recently Professor Denis Judd's Empire, a 500-page history of British Imperialism has no discussion of either the trade or the wars it occasioned, while the prestigious Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire has a couple of brief inadequate and uninformative paragraphs, a mere passing mention.(1) The opium trade deserves more attention. It was, in the words of John K. Fairbanks, "the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times."(2)
The production of opium in India first came under British control in the course of the eighteenth century. In the 1760s, some one thousand chests of opium (each weighing 140 lbs) were smuggled into China and this figure gradually increased to 4 thousand chests in 1800. By the 1820s the traffic in opium began to increase dramatically with over 12 thousand chests being smuggled into China in 1824, rising to 19 thousand in 1830, 30 thousand in 1835 and to 40 thousand chests (2,500 tons of opium) in 1838.(3) The British energetically encouraged poppy growing, on occasion coercing Indian peasant farmers into going over the crop. By the end of the 1830s the opium trade was already, and was to remain, "the world's most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century."(4)
The opium trade was of vital importance to British Imperialism at this time. It was one corner of an Eastern triangular trade that mirrored the eighteenth century Atlantic slave trade. The smuggling of opium turned a large British trading deficit with China into a substantial surplus, paying for British tea imports from China, for the export of British manufactured goods to India and for a substantial proportion of British administrative costs in India. The opium trade was "the hub of British commerce in the East."(5)
By the end of the 1830s a sixth of British overseas trade was with China and nearly two-thirds of that trade was in opium. In view of the tremendous importance of the trade, its neglect by economic historians and the historians of the British Empire is all the more surprising.
The Opium Capitalists
The opium trade was clearly not a small-scale affair carried out by small-time crooks and gangsters. Instead, it was a massive international commerce carried out by major British trading companies under the armed protection of the British state. According to Sir William Jardine of Jardine Matheson, the opium trade was "the safest and most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of." In a good year profits could be as high as $1,000 a chest!(6) His wealth was sufficient to buy him a seat in the House of Commons in the early 1840s and to get him the ear of the government.
Jardine Matheson was the most successful of the opium smuggling companies, and is still a major financial and trading company today. Jardine's partner in the enterprise, James Matheson, best shows the use to which the profits from drug pushing could be put. In the 1840s he too became an MP, sitting in the Commons for twenty-five years. He went on to become a governor of the Bank of England, chairman of the great P and O shipping line, and the second largest landowner in Britain. He bought the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and spent over [pounds]500,000 building himself a castle there!
The import of opium into China was, of course, illegal, but the British companies engaged in the trade systematically corrupted or intimidated the Chinese authorities so that it continued with little interruption. Depot ships were anchored off the coast, selling the drug to Chinese smugglers who carried it ashore for distribution. By the 1830s, the scale of the problem forced the Chinese government to respond: the country was being drained of silver to pay for the opium, its administration was being corrupted by foreigners and the extent of addiction (estimates of the number of addicts go as high as 12 million) was seen as a threat to both state and society. In March 1839, the Emperor sent a special Commissioner, Lin Tse-Hsu to Canton to stamp out the trade once and for all.
Lin confined the British merchants in Canton to the European Factories, holding them hostage until the opium held offshore was surrendered. After six weeks, the Superintendent of Trade, Captain Charles Elliot, capitulated and ordered the surrender of 10,000 chests which the Chinese destroyed. This precipitated the First Opium War.
The First Opium War
Once they had been expelled from Canton, the British established themselves on the island of Hong Kong, which they were determined to hold in the face of Chinese hostility. Meanwhile, the British government responded to Chinese actions by demanding compensation for the confiscated opium, the opening of more Chinese ports to trade, the permanent cession of Hong Kong, the legalization of the opium trade, and that China pay the full cost of the British war effort to enforce these demands. A powerful expeditionary force was despatched to bring the Chinese to their senses, first blockading the coast and then proceeding up the Yangtze river to Nanjing. The British had an overwhelming technological superiority that turned every battle into a one-sided massacre. As one British officer observed: "The poor Chinese" had two choices, either they "must submit to be poisoned, or must be massacred by the thousands, for supporting their own laws in their own land."(7)
The British capture of the port of Tin-hai in early October 1841 provides a useful example of the character of the war. The port was bombarded by the Wellesley (74 guns), the Conway and the Alligator (28 guns each), the Cruiser and the Algerine (18 guns each) and another dozen smaller vessels each carrying ten guns. In nine minutes, they fired fifteen broadsides into the effectively defenseless town before landing troops to storm the ruins. According to one British participant "the crashing of timber, falling houses and groans of men resounded from the shore" and when the smoke cleared "a mass of ruins presented itself to the eye." When the troops landed all they found was "a deserted beach, a few dead bodies, bows and arrows, broken spears and guns...."(8)
The shelling of the town continued as the British troops moved in to rape and pillage. According to the India Gazette. "A more complete pillage could not be conceived ... the plunder only ceased when there was nothing to take or destroy."(9) It was during this war that the Hindi word "lut" entered the English language as the word "loot." The taking of Tin-hai cost the British three men while the number of Chinese killed was over 2,000. Close behind the warships came the opium ships.
Were the British aware of the consequences of the trade they were intent on imposing on China? Lord Jocelyn, the military secretary to the expeditionary force, in his account of the war, described visiting an opium den in Singapore while en route to China:
One of the objects, at this place that I had the curiosity to visit, was the opium-smoker in his heaven; and certainly it is a most fearful sight.... On a beginner, one or two pipes will have an effect, but an old stager will continue smoking for hours ... A few days of this fearful luxury, when taken to excess, will give a pallid and haggard look to the face; and a few months, or even weeks, will change the strong and healthy man into little better than an idiot skeleton. The pain they suffer when deprived of the drug, after long habit, no language can explain ... The last scene in this tragic play is generally a room in the rear of the building, a species of dead-house, where lie stretched those who have passed into the state of bliss the opium-smoker madly seeks - an emblem of the long sleep to which he is blindly hurrying.
There can be no doubt of Lord Jocelyn's awareness of the realities of the opium trade, but later in his book he goes on to argue that "however hateful it may appear" the trade is nevertheless "a source of great benefit to the Indian government, returning I have heard, a revenue of upwards of two millions and a half yearly."(10) Put bluntly there was just too much money involved.
