The History of the Opium Wars: The Drug That Broke an Empire (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798191045849)

In 1839, the Qing Empire governed more people than any other state on Earth, presided over the largest economy in the world, and dictated the precise terms on which it would permit foreign merchants to trade with it at all. By 1860, that same empire had been defeated twice in a row by expeditionary forces a fraction the size of its own armies, had ceded sovereign territory outright, had been forced to legalise a narcotic its own government had spent decades trying to suppress, and had watched foreign troops burn one of its own emperors' great palaces to the ground as a calculated act of humiliation.

This is the story of how that happened. A trained surgeon who built a fortune addicting an entire nation, then personally lobbied his own government to go to war to protect it. A Qing commissioner of genuine and rare integrity, who wrote directly to Queen Victoria appealing to basic shared morality - and received no reply. A young consul who built a war from a ship's flag he almost certainly knew was not flying. A missionary's brutal death, seized upon as convenient justification for an alliance neither government actually needed an excuse to pursue. And a calculated act of cultural destruction, weighed deliberately against the alternative of attacking an emperor's own capital.

This is the story of a war fought to keep a drug trade flowing, and of the treaty system it produced - a cascading framework of concessions that would come to define China's relationship with the rest of the world for the following century, and that remains, in China's own political memory, a live and contested reference point to this day.

This book is a direct continuation of this series' earlier volume, The History of the East India Company, which first examined the commercial machinery behind this trade in full.

Part of The History of... series.