Early on a January morning in 1839, Mahsin bin Fadhul, sultan of Lahij and the Muslim ruler of the port town of Aden, perceived a small squadron of British ships standing offshore, poised for attack. Aden, on the shores of south-west Arabia, had been in British sights for some years, and the sultan had been engaged in desultory negotiations about a possible lease of the port with Commander Stafford Haines, a naval officer employed by the East India Company. The sultan had received a verbal offer from Haines, but on this particular morning the British officer was more interested in action than words.
Mahsin had been sultan of Lahij, a town in the desert some thirty miles inland of the port, for more than a decade. The defence of Aden was concentrated on the island of Sirah, a natural fortress overlooking the harbour entrance, and on it stood a sixty-foot tower, built at the sultan’s command. The sultan had 1,000 soldiers armed with matchlocks and thirty cannons.
Yet, as so often in the imperial story, this was an unequal struggle. The sultan was faced by several British warships, and transports with 700 British and Indian troops on board. If bombardment from the sea failed to secure his surrender, the sepoys would land and seize the town. Early that January morning, the defenders on Sirah were fired on by the British flagship, which had moved close to the shore. Neither the sultan’s proud tower nor his soldiers armed with matchlocks could offer an adequate response to the British cannonade, and the tower was toppled within the hour. British troops landed at Aden in the late morning, and made their way through the corpses of the defenders.1 The sultan’s palace soon flew the British flag, and the mullah at the principal mosque was asked to keep women and children within its walls while British ‘mopping-up’ operations took place in the town. The casualties among the defenders amounted to 150, and a serious incident occurred when twelve released prisoners were mown down by sentries. The sultan’s thirty guns were surrendered, and three fine specimens were sent to Queen Victoria, later to be placed in the Tower of London.
Sultan Mahsin did not accept British occupation gracefully, and 4,000 of his soldiers attacked the Aden garrison in December. They were fought off, and 200 were killed. Further unsuccessful attacks occurred in 1840. Sultan Mahsin abdicated that year in favour of his son Hamed, and he died in 1847. Commander Haines became the first ruler of British Aden, and ran the port town for fifteen years before ending his career in disgrace, accused of corruption. Put on trial in
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1854, he died in prison in Bombay in i860, aged fifty-eight. The British remained in Aden for more than a century and had nothing but trouble throughout their rule, which finally ended in 1967.
In August 1839, the 4,000 Chinese inhabitants of the island of Hong Kong observed the arrival of soldiers from a British fleet, a few months before the start of Britain’s ‘Opium War’ with China. No record exists of their reaction to this occupation, but they had witnessed the comings and goings of British ships for many years before their island was formally acquired and incorporated into the Empire. Lying at the entrance to the Pearl River, the route from the South China Sea to the major Chinese trading port of Canton [Guangdong], Hong Kong had long provided British fleets with a convenient and familiar anchorage. Cargoes were often unloaded there, and stowed into smaller coastal vessels for onward passage up the rivers of the Chinese mainland.
The original purpose of the occupation of Hong Kong, made permanent in 1842, was to safeguard the rearguard of the British forces engaged in punitive actions against Chinese cities. The sinking of Chinese junks off Canton in November 1839 marked the beginning of the first Opium War - a war brought to a formal conclusion three years later with the signing of the Nanking treaty in August 1842. Hong Kong was then ceded to Britain in perpetuity, and the Chinese were forced to accept that the cities of Canton and Shanghai, and three other towns designated as ‘treaty ports’ - Ningpo, Foochow, and Amoy - would be open for trade, with ‘reasonable’ tariffs. The first British governor of the new colony was General Sir Henry Pottinger, an officer who had spent much of his life in India, notably as the political agent in Sind during the invasion of Afghanistan. Later, in 1846, he became the governor at Cape Town.
Until the British occupation, Hong Kong island had only a population of a few thousand, but during the wartime upheaval many Canton traders moved to Hong Kong, to be followed by flocks of boatmen and artisans. The population trebled in three years, and by 1845 the island was home to more than 20,000 people ‘mostly of the lower classes: coolies, boat people, stone-cutters, domestic servants, craftsmen, small traders; in addition to Triads, pirates, outlaws, opium smugglers, brothel keepers, gamblers and like adventurers’.2 Few of the newcomers were women; adult males from the mainland left their families behind.
While the mainland traders came to Hong Kong largely because of the economic disruption caused by the British war, the island’s dramatic growth had other causes. The global need for labour, in the wake of the abolition of the African slave trade, was soon to have an important impact on the colony. Hong Kong became the principal centre for the vast Chinese emigration abroad in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the half-century before 1900, nearly 2 million Chinese labourers embarked from Hong Kong for a variety of different
Destinations. Much of this trade in ‘coolies’ went to North America, but much was destined for parts of the British Empire.3
While some migrants went to replace the freed slaves, others supplied the demand for labour in territories where the indigenous inhabitants were being exterminated. As poisoned ‘damper’ took its toll of the Aborigines, and as the supply of Irish convicts tailed off, Chinese labourers were sent to take their place. In one year alone, 1857, more than 17,000 ‘coolies’ left Hong Kong for Australia. Racial animosity towards the Chinese eventually caused the trade to decline, yet a further 17,000 were sent out in the years between i860 and 1874. Earlier the flow of migrants, often carried in Chinese-owned ships flying the British flag, was the partial cause of the second British war against China, in 1857, which concluded with a march on Peking and the burning of the emperor’s Summer Palace in September 1860.
World History
