{"id":44578,"date":"2018-08-20T03:00:50","date_gmt":"2018-08-20T07:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44578"},"modified":"2018-08-19T12:02:10","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T16:02:10","slug":"the-opium-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/08\/20\/the-opium-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The Opium War"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Quillette<\/em>, Jeffrey Chen<\/a> reviews Song-Chuan Chen\u2019s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The war had a name even before its first shot. The first recorded use of the moniker, the \u2018Opium War,\u2019 was in an 1839 piece in the London Morning Herald<\/em>; within months it would be echoed across the benches of Parliament and across the carronades of the fleet sent to punish the Chinese crackdown on British trade. \"\"<\/a>The war\u2019s nomenclature revealed from the beginning the multivalent views the British public held towards the war: it was at once the \u201cunjust and iniquitous\u201d Opium War \u2014 to use Gladstone\u2019s well-known phrase \u2014 as well as the patriotic \u2018China War,\u2019 as its proponents wanted it to be called. The historiography of the war is similarly divided among varied lines. Some see the war as reflective of China\u2019s failure to catch up to Western technologies; others emphasize the British desire to avenge their slighted national honour as the prime motive for the conflict. A wide array of scholars have placed a central focus on the role of opium, while some prefer to see the war in the context of imperial and economic expansion. Song-Chuan Chen\u2019s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War<\/em> is a worthy addition to these voices.<\/p>\n

Chen\u2019s portrait of the Opium War places the role of British traders and their lobbying efforts in the foreground by arguing that it was British knowledge of China, as transmitted via the merchant class, that contributed to the \u2018making\u2019 (in the sense of both manufacture and execution) of the war. Chen asserts that it was the decade-long campaign of bellicose editorials and pamphlets on the part of the Canton merchant intelligentsia, as well as an accumulation of knowledge on the details of China\u2019s coastal defences and overall military strength, that made it possible for Britain to both conceive of and win the war. The book casts, as its main actors, the \u2018Warlike Party,\u2019 a group of British merchants in Canton who lobbied for military intervention to expand the Canton System of trade, and the \u2018Pacific Party,\u2019 who opposed the war and criticised the diffusion of opium as an illicit and immoral drug. By narrowing his focus towards the production of knowledge, Chen also elevates the importance of language. A chapter of the book is devoted to a summary of the \u2018Barbarian\u2019 controversy \u2013 the disagreements and narratives spun around the British choice in translating the Chinese character \u5937 (Y\u00ed) as \u2018Barbarian,\u2019 rather than \u2018Foreigner.\u2019<\/p>\n

Chen\u2019s account is thus of a battle as much between China and Britain as an internal conflict within the British public sphere. Though Chen is careful to nuance his depiction of the war by overlaying the many causal factors detailed by existing scholarship, his book makes two main arguments, which, in the words of the author, are new to the field: firstly, that the decisive factor in the war\u2019s escalation was due to the machinations of the Warlike Party; and secondly, that the Canton System represented a \u2018soft border\u2019 through which the British were able to secure intelligence on the Qing state, without a reciprocal exchange of knowledge.<\/p>\n

Written in engaging, lucid prose that presents its ideas clearly, if repetitively, Chen\u2019s monograph is studded with riveting selections of his primary source research, drawn from the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge\u2019s Jardine & Matheson archive. These quotations are often reproduced at generous length from the Warlike Party\u2019s Canton Register and the Pacific Party\u2019s Canton Press, and they provide a revealing account of the vigorous rhetorical strategies employed by the two camps.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Quillette, Jeffrey Chen reviews Song-Chuan Chen\u2019s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War: The war had a name even before its first shot. The first recorded use of the moniker, the \u2018Opium War,\u2019 was in an 1839 piece in the London Morning Herald; within months […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,22,7,28],"tags":[119,269],"class_list":["post-44578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-china","category-history","category-media","tag-drugs","tag-propaganda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bB0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44580,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44578\/revisions\/44580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}