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Addiction, Arrogance, and Aggression: e
Question of Aitude in the First Opium War
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ADDICTION, ARROGANCE, AND AGGRESSION:
THE QUESTION OF ATTITUDE IN THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
By C. Claire Summers
“We [Britain] seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the
world in a fit of absence of mind.” –J. R. Seeley, 1883
1
The nineteenth century was an era of resurgent expansion for
Britain. The development of the British Empire was once again in full
force, and this was one of the most influential factors in the formation of
the British cultural mentality during this time. This neo-imperialism in
Britain created a sharp increase in patriotic and apparently benevolent
sentiment—the idea that the British Empire was the pinnacle of modernity,
and that it could be only generous to spread its rule to other parts of the
world. The British extended the reach of their Empire in the nineteenth
century not only through military conquest, but through trade as well. One
of the areas that fell under British influence during this period was China,
whose isolationist foreign policy differed dramatically from Britain’s. The
British inserted themselves into the Chinese economy by means of the
opium trade, which served to support the British addiction to that coveted
Chinese substance, tea. The meeting of these two cultures created a
dangerously charged political situation that culminated in violence with the
beginning of what has become known as the First Opium War in 1839.
Historical interpretations of this conflict’s origins varied considerably
throughout the decades since its occurrence, and many focused on the
development of the opium-tea trade as the primary cause. To grasp the
story in its entirety, however, it is necessary to widen the historical scope
beyond the influence of opium itself. While the opium trade was both the
immediate cause and primary catalyst of the First Opium War, from a
greater historical distance it appears that the war was largely the result of
an attitude collision: on the one hand the cavalier indifference of British
imperial officials, and on the other the cultural superiority of the Chinese
government.
1
J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, 1883 (Reprint, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1971): 12.
TENOR OF OUR TIMES Spring 2016
4
Lawrence James, a historian of the British Empire, neatly
summarized the paradox of their imperial mindset in his Rise and Fall of
the British Empire: “[Empire] encouraged a sense of superiority… It also
fostered racial arrogance. And yet at the same time, deeply-rooted liberal
and evangelical ideals produced a powerful sense of imperial duty and
mission.”
2
These various factors combined with a burgeoning sense of
nationalism, fostered by victory over Napoleon earlier in the century, to
create a strange dichotomy in which Britain desired good for its colonies
and dependencies and yet felt little compulsion to work to understand their
cultural differences—as tales of the first diplomatic contact between
Britain and China plainly reveal.
3
The first British ambassador to China was Lord George
Macartney, an experienced and distinguished young diplomat who had
recently completed a successful term as the governor of Madras in British
India.
4
His posting in China, however, would not prove so effective. He
arrived in 1792 on a mission to initiate diplomatic contact between the two
countries, and the sign affixed to his boat by his Chinese escorts clearly
illustrated the fundamental misunderstanding between these two countries.
It read, in effect: “Tribute-bearer from England.”
5
China was not
accustomed to negotiating with foreign nations; rather, they were used to
accepting tribute from the other Asian countries that rested in their
enormous shadow.
6
The British, however, clearly had a very limited
knowledge of Chinese culture and anticipated no such thing. British
tradition involved presenting gifts to a foreign prince, but always with the
understanding that the gifts were offered as a sign of respect and not as a
way of paying homage to a superior power. Tensions increased during
Macartney’s audience with the Emperor, particularly over what would
become one of the primary illustrations of the British-Chinese culture
clash: the kowtow.
2
Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St.
Martin’s Griffin, 1994), xiv.
3
W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of
One Empire and the Corruption of Another (Naperville: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2002), 13-
16. See pages 3-4 for additional explanation.
4
Ibid., 14.
5
“The Reception of the First English Ambassador to China, 1792,” ed. Paul
Halsall, Internet History Sourcebook: Modern, (Accessed April 11, 2015).
6
Hanes and Sanello, 15.
The Question of Attitude in the First Opium War
5
Any foreign visitor to the Chinese court, upon arrival, was
required to perform the kowtow before the emperor—that is, to bow, kneel,
and place forehead to floor nine times. It seemed that Macartney would
have readily performed this ritual, but only if the emperor made the same
gesture in return before a portrait of King George III. In the end, neither
party conceded and the visit drew to a close. Although this incident caused
no major repercussions, the British envoy returned from China without
making any real diplomatic progress. This alone would probably have been
forgotten as a simple misunderstanding, were it not for the second British
attempt a few decades later that proved even less productive and generated
more tension than the first. Lord Amherst, the British ambassador to China
sent in 1816, flatly refused to kowtow and apparently offered no potential
solutions to this quandary. Although the Chinese government worked to
come up with a compromise, they could not seem to find a remedy that
satisfied both sides and the situation ended in a stalemate. Amherst was
denied audience with Emperor Jiaqing and eventually returned to Britain;
the only accomplishment was the bruised egos of both empires.
7
These two
incidents combined were representative of the irreconcilable differences
between Britain and China. The problems could likely have been averted if
the British had put forth more effort to understand the mindset of the
Chinese, or if the Chinese had been able to step back and meet with the
British ambassadors as equals rather than tribute-bearing barbarians.
8
China and Britain both exhibited a similar cultural arrogance that
accompanied the development of a stable empire. China, however, had
solidified their empire much earlier (many historians agree that Imperial
China began with the Qin dynasty in the third century BC) and had
established themselves as the peak of civilization in the Far East.
9
As a
result of this cultural superiority, the Chinese government generally viewed
foreigners as barbarians.
10
China had shut down foreign trade in an attempt
to keep Chinese society pure. This perturbed the British, who had
developed a love for tea (at that point only available in China) and a belief
7
Summary of these diplomatic meetings drawn from Hanes and Sanello
(14-24) and “The Reception of the First English Ambassador to China, 1792.”
8
Toby & Will Musgrave, An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that
Changed the World (London: Cassell & Co, 2000): 123.
9
C. P. Fitzgerald, The Chinese View of Their Place in the World (London:
Oxford University Press, 1964): 1-2.
10
Hanes and Sanello, xii.
TENOR OF OUR TIMES Spring 2016
6
that they had a “right to conduct unrestricted trade throughout the world.”
11
Indeed, John Quincy Adams, still not far removed from the British Empire
himself, called the Chinese system “churlish and unsocial.”
12
Their
divergent mentalities seemed diplomatically irreconcilable, portending
Kipling’s words from 1889: “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never
the twain shall meet.”
13
Cultural attitudes planted the seed for the
nineteenth-century trade conflict that eventually sparked the First Opium
War.
India was, without doubt, the largest supplier of opium for the
Chinese. By the 1800s, however, the title “India” as an administrative term
referred for all practical purposes to the British East India Company. This
meant that the true regulation of the opium trade rested not with the native
government of India, but with the British. This opium traffic began as a
gradual trade process not unlike that of any other commodity, such as
tobacco. China’s appetite for opium grew exponentially with the discovery
that smoking the leaves produced a more intense hallucinogenic experience
than alternate methods of consumption.
14
This newly developing method of
opium consumption rendered the user almost completely inert while under
the influence and provoked higher addiction rates with much more
debilitating withdrawal symptoms than eating or drinking the drug.
15
Naturally, as Chinese dependency on the drug grew in the early nineteenth
century, demand for the product increased rapidly and the East India
Company rose to the occasion with enthusiasm.
11
James, 236.
12
John Quincy Adams, “Lecture on the War with China, delivered before
the Massachusetts Historical Society, December 1841,” in The Chinese Repository
vol. XI (Canton: Printed for the proprietors, 1842): 277.
13
Rudyard Kipling, 1889. Reprint: The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling
(London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994): 245. This quote is taken out of context
of the spirit of Kipling’s poem, but the idea is useful in this instance.
14
In both Western and Eastern countries opium was frequently prescribed as
a medical aid to treat nervous disorders, general pains, and really almost anything. In
the West it was generally administered as part of a mixture of medicines; laudanum
was one of the most common forms of an opium remedy. The use of opium in a
restorative capacity led to many instances of both inadvertent addiction and
exacerbation of medical issues. [Peter Ward Fay, 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 (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1975): 7-8.]
15
Fay, 8-10.
The Question of Attitude in the First Opium War
7
Tea was the other essential component of the Chinese-British
trading relationship. Britain had first been exposed to this drink in the mid-
seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth century tea consumption in
Britain had increased dramatically.
16
At that point China was virtually the
only source of these leaves to which the British had become so attached.
17
In fact, by the late eighteenth century China was supplying Britain with
fifteen million pounds of tea each year,
18
creating a significant trade
imbalance since the British had very little to offer that the Chinese desired.
China would only accept payment in the form of silver, placing enormous
strain on the British economy as the government and merchants worked to
keep their citizens supplied with their beverage of choice. China’s growing
dependence on opium proved to be the answer to their economic woes,
since Britain had gained control of the opium industry through the
incorporation of India into the Empire.
19
Opium seemed the most workable
solution to the trade impasse: the British would export the drug from India
to China, sell it for silver, and use their profits to purchase tea from China.
This triangular trade that developed between Britain, India, and China set
the stage for the Anglo-Chinese conflict, further illustrating how the
countries’ attitudes toward each other were the underlying causes of the
open warfare that was to come.
Although the East India Company initially wanted to avoid
engaging in illegal trade in China, by the end of the eighteenth century the
economic pressures proved too great for them to continue ignoring such a
large potential for profit.
20
The Company began selling opium outright to
the Chinese but soon realized that, as an official agency of the British
government, it was bad foreign policy for them to directly contravene the
Chinese government’s 1799 opium ban.
21
The British found a morally
dubious technicality that allowed them to circumvent this prohibition. The
Company began auctioning off the opium to private British merchants in
Calcutta with, in the words of Roy Moxham, “no questions asked as to its
16
Hanes and Sanello, 20.
17
Roy Moxham, Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire (New York:
Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2003): 64.
18
Hanes and Sanello, 20.
19
Ibid., 20.
20
Ibid., 20.
21
Ibid., 21.
TENOR OF OUR TIMES Spring 2016
8
final destination.”
22
The independent traders would then transport the
opium to China for illicit sale and use the profits to bring precious tea back
to England. Placing the responsibility of the actual buying and selling in
the hands of private citizens essentially absolved the British government of
any technical liability. This trade situation was a clear example of Britain’s
cavalier attitude toward imperialism. They did not maliciously plan to
create a nationwide addiction to a hallucinogenic drug; the trade developed
as a matter of expediency, and they allowed it to happen as they followed
opportunities to achieve their economic ends without any in-depth
consideration of the human cost. This method worked for several decades,
and as addiction levels in China swiftly rose, so did the concern of the
Chinese government.
Serious misgivings about the growth of the opium trade developed
in the Chinese government several decades before the issue came to a head
in military conflict. Already dubious about permitting interaction with
foreign traders, the Chinese government had restricted external merchant
access to the city of Canton by the time the British paid their first official
diplomatic visit.
23
Beginning in 1760, Chinese officials established an
official trading season from October to May every year, prohibited
foreigners from interacting with Chinese citizens without official
supervision, and forbade all foreign merchants from learning Chinese.
24
This “Canton System” remained in place until the end of the First Opium
War, but had little effect on the influx of the drug into Chinese society;
merchants had only to bribe the Chinese trade administrators and the trade
continued to flourish, worsening diplomatic tensions.
25
As the British rashly pressed their trade advantage, China still
refused to engage with the world around them, which was evolving into a
progressively more globalized society. Chinese officials could not,
however, ignore the negative effects of the foreign opium trade on their
society. Opium had become so popular that by the early 1800s the 1760
government ban on its trade had almost no effect.
26
In 1820 Chinese opium
22
Moxham, 67.
23
Musgrave, 123.
24
Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970): 120.
25
Musgrave, 126.
26
Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy: A
Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750-1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999): 92-97.
The Question of Attitude in the First Opium War
9
imports reached a level of 4,000 chests a year (over 350,000 pounds) and a
decade later that number increased to 18,000 chests (2.5 million pounds) at
an annual cost of £2.2 million.
27
This soon prompted drastic action from
the government, especially after another, more severe prohibition edict
failed to effect any noticeable change. The conflict began in earnest in
1838 with the appointment of Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu (or Tse-
Hu).
28
Commissioner Lin was under strict orders from the Emperor to
find a way to curtail the opium problem.
29
In the years before his
appointment the government had waved aside suggestions to appeal
directly to the British Crown, but by 1839 the problem had grown bad
enough that Lin decided to try.
30
He wrote a letter to Queen Victoria
stating in no uncertain terms how much the Chinese government detested
the opium trade and admonishing Victoria to cease immediately or risk
severe consequences.
31
Lin’s language in this letter exhibited a good deal
of the cultural superiority typical of imperial China, referring to China as
the “Inner Land” or “Center Land” and saying, “Our celestial empire rules
over ten thousand kingdoms! Most surely do we possess a measure of
godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom!”
32
He also, however, made some
comments that directly struck the heart of the matter:
We find that your country is distant from us about sixty or
seventy thousand miles, that your foreign ships come hither
striving the one with the other for our trade, and for the
simple reason of their strong desire to reap a profit. Now,
out of the wealth of our Inner Land, if we take a part to
bestow upon foreigners from afar, it follows, that the
immense wealth which the said foreigners amass, ought
properly speaking to be portion of our own native Chinese
people. By what principle of reason then, should these
foreigners send in return a poisonous drug, which involves
27
Trocki, 94; Moxham, 69.
28
Arthur Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1958): 12.
29
Ibid., 12.
30
Ibid., 27-28.
31
Lin Zexu, “Commissioner Lin: Letter to Queen Victoria, 1839,” ed. Paul
Halsall, Internet History Sourcebook: Modern (accessed 25 April 2015).
32
Ibid.
TENOR OF OUR TIMES Spring 2016
10
in destruction those very natives of China?
33
Without
meaning to say that the foreigners harbor such destructive
intentions in their hearts, we yet positively assert that from
their inordinate thirst after gain, they are perfectly careless
about the injuries they inflict upon us!
34
Commissioner Lin voiced within these lines his own view of British
imperial haphazardness: that the British had, in their pursuit of economic
gain, inadvertently created an addiction that crippled an entire country.
China had become a branch of Britain’s informal economic empire. Lin
went on to inform the Queen that new severe penalties had been attached to
the trafficking of opium: foreign merchants caught selling opium would be
beheaded, and all property aboard their ships seized. These new terms did
offer a period of grace during which any merchants who voluntarily
surrendered their illicit cargo would be spared the death penalty.
35
Common historical agreement indicates that although Queen Victoria
never received Commissioner Lin’s letter, the British were made aware of
the Chinese government’s new terms through other outlets.
36
Commissioner Lin resolutely implemented his new policies. He
immediately confiscated and destroyed any opium or drug paraphernalia
found in China and arrested hundreds of Chinese users and dealers in the
Canton area.
37
Eventually, after the attempted arrest of several prominent
British merchants (one of whom he planned on beheading to serve as an
example), Lin blockaded the British into their factories at Canton. Only
after the British merchant ships off the coast of Canton surrendered all
their contraband opium did Lin finally allow them to leave the city and
return home. This hostage situation and temporary surrender dealt a severe
blow to British pride. The incident, combined with Lin’s use of tactics
Britain considered underhanded such as poisoning wells and cutting off
33
Lin also mentions later in the letter that the British should not sell a
substance in China that is illegal in their own country. In fact, though this was difficult
to research, it does not seem as though there were any laws prohibiting opium in
Britain at this time. It is likely that this was because smoking opium was uncommon
there during this period. Most people took it medicinally, as mentioned earlier. This is
not to say that the British did not have an opium problem; addiction and overdoses
were very common.
34
Lin Zexu, “Letter to Queen Victoria.”
35
Ibid.
36
Hanes and Sanello, 40-41.
37
Ibid., 41.
The Question of Attitude in the First Opium War
11
food supplies, eventually led to the opening shots of the First Opium War
in September of 1839.
38
The conflict began as a direct result of Lin’s attempted arrest of
British citizens and his refusal to allow British ships to access food and
supplies. After warning the Chinese that they would attack if not allowed
to resupply, the British fired on the Chinese war junks that were blocking
access to Hong Kong.
39
This first minor battle resulted in a dubious success
for the Chinese—they far outnumbered the British, and were therefore able
to fend them off long enough to put an end to the brief confrontation. The
Chinese government, however, received a dramatically exaggerated
account of this battle as a wondrous victory over the barbarians.
40
Jack
Beeching, author of The Chinese Opium Wars, commented that this kind of
hyperbole both exemplified China’s superior attitude and hindered the
Chinese government from receiving reliable information about the war.
Beeching observed, “The passionate anti-foreign sentiment being aroused
in Canton by the scholars who followed Lin’s lead was from now on to hail
any major setback to the foreign devils as a Smashing Blow.”
41
The war
had finally begun in earnest, and due to China’s inward focus government
officials had no idea of the damage the British were capable of inflicting.
Although the decision to force open Chinese trade was met with
substantial debate, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston largely quashed
British concerns in Parliament.
42
Palmerston, who had been instrumental in
the development of trade with China and in the unfolding of the opium
conflict, was adamant that China should open its gates to foreign nations.
He employed his skills as a politician and orator to rally the support of the
Parliamentary majority, and soon raised the necessary support to send a
British Navy force to Canton in response to these perceived injustices.
43
Before long the British had taken Hong Kong and mounted a campaign up
the Yangtze River, ultimately capturing Shanghai.
44
China’s outdated
38
Summary of Lin’s response taken from Hanes and Sanello, 41-66.
39
Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1975): 90-91.
40
Beeching, 92.
41
Ibid., 92.
42
One of the most vocal opponents to not only the war but the opium trade
as a whole was William Gladstone, who would later become Prime Minister several
years after Palmerston himself.
43
Beeching, 108-111.
44
James, 237.
TENOR OF OUR TIMES Spring 2016
12
military technology was far inferior to Britain’s, and after three years the
Chinese were forced to surrender.
The Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing), signed to bring the hostilities to
a close, was a humiliating blow for China, who was forced to fully cede
Hong Kong to the British, as well as open five other “treaty ports” where
Western merchants could trade freely. The treaty also abolished the Canton
System and required China to pay full reparations for the opium that had
been confiscated or destroyed. Britain did not push for the legitimization of
the opium trade; at that point popular objections in both China and Britain
were vocal enough to prevent this. The treaty, however, was disingenuous;
in fact, even the continued ban on opium facilitated British interests since
they retained a monopoly on the illegal opium trade in China.
45
The crux of the conflict between Britain and China was evident in
the terms of the Treaty of Nanking. The catalyst of the war—the
regulations on the opium trade—technically did not change as a result of
the treaty. Although British opium sales continued to flourish, more
importantly Britain had accomplished the greater goal of undermining
Chinese isolationism and autonomy. The imperial edicts forbidding opium
had clearly not been a problem for the British when they could be
subverted; Britain had been more concerned with loosening the regulations
on foreign trade in general. Now, with Hong Kong a fully British port and
five more cities open to Westerners, China was truly part of the informal
empire. Through casually unleashing a destructive substance on a
sequestered population, Britain had drawn the attention and retribution of
the Chinese government. Now, with their victory in the lopsided war,
Britain forced China into an economic relationship with them and
expanded the Empire even further.
Historiography reveals a distinct rift in opinions surrounding the
causes of the First Opium War during its immediate aftermath and into the
early twentieth century. Dr. Tan Chung attests to this in his book China
and the Brave New World, stating: “Controversy on this conflict had
started even before the war ended.”
46
Most of the debate centers on the
45
Summary of the terms of the treaty drawn form Gregory Blue, “Opium for
China: The British Connection,” in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-
1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000): 34-35.
46
Tan Chung, China and the Brave New World (Durham: Carolina
Academic Press, 1978), 1.
The Question of Attitude in the First Opium War
13
nomenclature; many of those writing at the time of the war, including both
British and American scholars, disliked the term “Opium War.” They
believed the war resulted largely from the culture clash between
imperialistic Britain and reclusive China, saying that China’s ingrained
feeling of cultural superiority made them antagonistic to British traders and
explorers.
47
Some were disinclined to identify the introduction of the
opium trade by the British as the cause of the conflict on any level. As
studies regarding the war progressed, scholars began developing a more
balanced perspective. Many modern authors began condemning the work
of the earlier writers as Eurocentric and revisionist, saying they were
simply trying to justify British exploitation of the Chinese. In all of these
works, the question of opium and where it fit in the causation of this
conflict was one of the predominant questions.
In a lecture to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1841, John
Quincy Adams pinpointed the kowtow specifically as one of the chief
causes of the war. In his words, the issues were primarily caused by the
Chinese view that “in all their intercourse with other nations…their
superiority must be implicitly acknowledged, and manifested in
humiliating forms.”
48
In a brief historiographical essay, Far East scholar
Tan Chung identified Adams as the initiator of the academic controversy
surrounding the causes of the Opium Wars.
49
Adams certainly stated his
opinions concerning the origin of the conflict in no uncertain terms:
It is a general, but I believe altogether mistaken opinion,
that the quarrel is merely for certain chests of opium
imported by British merchants into China, and seized by
the Chinese government for having been imported contrary
to law. This is a mere incident to the dispute; but no more
the cause of the war, than the throwing overboard of the tea
in Boston Harbor was the cause of the North American
revolution.
50
Although perhaps overstated, Adams’s point merits consideration,
particularly considering the extent of the obvious cultural and political
47
Ibid., 1
48
Adams lecture, 281.
49
Chung, 1.
50
Adams lecture, 281.
TENOR OF OUR TIMES Spring 2016
14
conflicts between China and Britain from the beginning of their diplomatic
interactions.
51
The debate continued in the decades following the First Opium
War, varying in conclusion but always revolving around the opium issue.
Chung’s China and the Brave New World provided a historiographical
essay in which he discussed the causes of the war. He presented three
existing theories regarding the nature of the war: a cultural war, a trade
war, or an opium war.
52
Chung himself wrote in order to “revitalize the
opium-war perspective” and provide a rebuttal against the other two
theories, in direct contrast to Adams’s cultural theory.
53
Carl Trocki’s
Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy examined the economic
consequences of the opium trade and argued that, rather than extending the
reach of the British Empire, opium made the Empire possible. This
represented the “trade war” perspective of the three outlined by Tan
Chung. Among Trocki’s many emphatic statements concerning the issue of
opium trafficking, this may have been the boldest: “I argue here that
without the drug, there probably would have been no British Empire.”
54
He
suggested that without the revenues from the opium trade the British would
have been unable to finance their colonial ventures. As evidenced by the
body of scholarship surrounding this conflict, researchers have often
disputed the true cause of the First Opium War.
The war left an undeniable mark on Chinese society, particularly
through the terms of the Treaty of Nanking and the development of their
foreign trade. For the British, however, it was simply another chapter in the
development of Empire. Nothing significantly changed for the ordinary
British at home; they continued to drink their tea as China’s foreign policy
was being turned upside down. This could have influenced Britain’s casual
imperialistic attitude: their various spheres of influence lay so far removed
from everyday life that it became easy to approach these foreign
interactions in a more cavalier manner than they otherwise might have, had
they taken place closer to home. Indeed, the war began primarily because
the British felt that their pride and supremacy had been challenged. They
51
Adams’s ideas were met with some uncertainty and opposition even in his
own time (Josiah Quincy, Memoirs of the Life of John Quincy Adams (Boston:
Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Company, 1860): 336.
52
Chung, 3.
53
Ibid., 12.
54
Trocki, xiii.
The Question of Attitude in the First Opium War
15
believed China had encroached on their jurisdiction by attempting to
administer justice on British citizens, while China believed the British
were trespassing foreign barbarians who should have been kept out of the
country. Both sides had become too blinded by both perceived and genuine
wrongs to attempt diplomatic reconciliation any longer. Through an
examination of these factors it becomes clear that, although the opium
trade was indeed the catalyst for the war, the true causes ran much deeper
than the opium problem in itself—deeper, in fact, than economics in
general. This was a collision of ideologies and attitudes, caused at its true
roots by the relentless nationalism of one country, which blinded them to
the human cost of their actions; and by the obstinate isolationism of the
other in a world that was rapidly becoming more internationally connected
than it had ever been before.
