The Opium Wars

The East India Company were well placed to ply this shady but lucrative trade. Opium had been grown in the west of India by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and the Dutch in the seventeenth, but the richest plantations were in the east, across the Ganges plains from Bengal to Benares, and these had fallen into British hands with the collapse of the Mughal empire. Opium growing was labour intensive, and the disruption and displacement had left many of the plantations neglected or abandoned. The Company reorganized them into an efficient agribusiness, with a system of advance payment to farmers for every stage of the process - seeding, planting, harvesting, harrowing - to keep the fields fertile and productive. The opium was stored in huge factories at Patna, the traditional centre of the opium-growing region, and sold by private auction at Calcutta.

The British attitude to opium was ambivalent from the start. Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of Bengal, had regarded it as a

‘pernicious item of luxury’, the sale of which needed to be placed under some form of official control. If every merchant and nation was allowed to buy opium, the bidding war would raise prices and increase production, flooding the world with a potent and dangerous drug at prices that would encourage its misuse. On the other hand, prohibiting the trade would only gift it to the illicit contraband market, as was already the case in China, and there was little appetite in Britain for suppressing such a profitable crop. It was decided that the best solution was for the trade to become a Company monopoly. With British government approval, Dutch stocks of Indian opium were bought up and the East India Company cornered the market in the one commodity that the Chinese valued more than silver.

Opium production on an industrial scale in Patna, India. The resin is mixed in troughs until it is the right consistency for forming into balls, which are stacked in a huge warehouse complex (above). (Wellcome Library, London)

There was, however, a serious obstacle to the trade: the Chinese prohibition. By 1820 the business was, although illegal, relatively formalized. Smuggling vessels, usually fast clippers, would head for the mouth of the Pearl River below the port of Canton. They would pass the Portuguese trade enclave of Macao and put in at Lintin Island, a jaggec mountain outcrop in the Canton bay. Here, fifty-oared Chinese boats, known as ‘centipedes’ or ‘scrambling dragons’, would dash out to meet them, exchange chests of opium for previously negotiated quantities of silver and then beach the opium at hidden spots along the coast. Although the trade was carried out in sight of the Emperor’s harbourmasters and customs officers, who were cut in on the deal, it could only be transacted by pirates who had nothing to lose. If the East India Company attempted the same, it would not only be condemned by British public opinion but would run the risk of losing the tea concession that was its lifeblood.

The obvious solution to this problem was to sell through intermediaries, which became considerably easier after the Company’s trade monopoly with China was brought to an end in 1831. Now the British government could work hand-in-glove with independent British operators, while still maintaining a public facade of separation from the business. The most ambitious and well-known of these smugglers was the firm of Jardine and Matheson, a pair of Scottish entrepreneurs who had previously traded in Dutch opium and built up a fleet of the fastest clippers in the world, known as ‘greyhounds of the seas’. In the East, they were discreet about their role in the opium trade, justifying their presence on the south China coast as missionary activity distributing bibles; back in Britain, they were well-connected political lobbyists, arguing for the principle of free trade and against the illegitimate imperial ban on the desires of the people. Industrial production of opium in Bengal was now matched by the world’s most efficient shipping system, and by 1840 Jardine and Matheson were selling six thousand opium chests a year. Over the decade between 1830 and 1840 the British trade deficit was reversed, and the treasury received a surplus of 366 tons of Chinese silver.

Opium has been cultivated in India since antiquity; it is said to have been introduced by Alexander the Great. It was commonly eaten or drunk, as it continues to be in areas such as Rajasthan today. Here, in a painting made around 1810, ascetics in Udaipur prepare and consume opium as part of their devotions. (Wellcome Library, London)

With China struggling against floods, famines and an economic depression, and the imperial court consumed by conflicts and rebellions, British traders became more brazen in flouting the opium prohibition, and even attempted to discuss the business with high officials behind the Emperor’s back. This was an insult that could not go unpunished, and in 1839 the Emperor appointed a new commissioner, Lin Zexu, a highly capable and scrupulous minister with orders to root out official corruption, dismantle all informal arrangements with opium smugglers and crack down hard on the illegal trade. When the British traders ignored his orders, Lin imprisoned them in their offices until they surrendered their stocks: 2,613,879 lbs of opium, the best part of a year’s supply. He considered burning it, but feared that the residue would still be smokable, so on 17 June 1839 he had it thrown into the harbour and churned with salt and lime to prevent it being recovered. When he followed this insult with an admonition to Queen Victoria to destroy all opium within her territories, the British parliament declared war and dispatched a fleet of gunships that sailed up the estuary and pounded the harbour of Chusan to rubble.

The ‘Great Fleet’: British vessels laden with cotton and opium descending the Ganges en route to the port of Calcutta (Kolkata). (Wellcome Library, London)

After further raids along the coast, in 1842 the Chinese signed the Treaty of Nanking, legitimizing the opium trade and ceding the island of Hong Kong to Britain. Skirmishes resumed in a second war of 1856-60, in which British troops advanced as far as Beijing and destroyed the Emperor’s Summer Palace. With the Opium Wars, as the conflicts became known, they destroyed China’s pretensions to imperial status and reduced her to the level of a semi-colony: a warehouse of foreign goods, traded across the global market on British terms. By monopolizing opium production in India and opening the Chinese market, the British were able to gain a decisive ascendancy in the East over their traditional rivals, the Portuguese and the Dutch. Drugs such as tobacco, tea and opium had driven global trade from the beginning and were now determining its imperial endgame.

In the opening skirmish of the Opium Wars, the British naval fleet sailed up the Pearl River and sank a number of Chinese warships. Chinese propagandists claimed victory, but were forced to surrender in 1842 after further punitive raids. (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

The global drug trade had risen along with the nation-state, but the relationship between the two had always been an uneasy one. In the sixteenth century, it had been traders and merchants who shaped the trade, forcing national governments to react with panicky prohibitions or opportunistic taxation. With the rise of the Dutch and British East India Companies, merchants and traders had been made subservient to the laws and policies of their nations, and to their strategic goals and alliances. By the late nineteenth century, however, the world was shrinking, its affairs falling under the control of a handful of great powers, and the nation-state was becoming subservient to international treaties. Once again, the drug trade would be in the forefront of the new dispensation. National prohibitions of drugs had always been undermined by the global market, but now international prohibition was becoming feasible, and Britain’s opium trade with China would become its defining cause.