Introduction

This chapter expounds on how the making of war and British knowledge about China were intertwined, and proves a brief review on Opium War literature. What previous historiography saw as the reasons for starting the war were, in actuality, new knowledge about China to the British, which was made in Canton by the Warlike party as both a discourse for mobilising the British state to wage the war and as a moral justification afterwards. The following five chapters explain this new knowledge and its relationship to the Canton system and the war argument.

Conclusions: Profit Orders of Canton

The concluding chapter theorizes, in the context of historical capitalism, how the Canton system and the First Opium War created different kind of ‘profit orders’ for the Chinese and the British respectively and how the war represents a clash of the two orders.

A War of Words over ‘Barbarian’

This chapter assesses a decade-long debate that occurred within the British community in Canton over how best to translate the word ‘yi夷‎’—as either ‘barbarian’ or ‘strangers’. The dispute first raged in the Canton Register for more than two years beginning in 1828, and played a key role in igniting the war argument in 1830. The community agreed that it meant ‘barbarian’, representing a Chinese conception of foreigners as uncivilised savages. The translation was in wide circulation after the 1835 war lobbying campaign in London and formed an integral part of the pro-war argument. However, by 1837 the Canton community belatedly retracted their earlier translation, believing that yi should be rendered into English as ‘strangers’. However, in the early Qing, the main word used to name Europeans and things European was xiyang (Western Ocean). This term was replaced by ‘yi’ after the 1750s, coinciding with the establishment of the Canton system. Yi was another part of the Chinese soft border that classified Europeans as ‘strangers’ to be kept out of the Chinese civilizational order and was also another ideological device used to shore up the port’s vested interests.

Intellectual Artillery

This chapter observes that the Warlike party launched an informational war to penetrate the soft borders that constrained information flow and interaction. Their efforts concentrated on the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, with the objective of spreading knowledge about the European world to the Chinese. They prepared, as they termed it, ‘intellectual artillery’ in the form of Chinese-language publications, especially material related to world geography, to distribute among the Chinese to inform them of the truth about the British in the hope that it would lead China to ‘open up’ from the inside. In establishing the society, the Warlike party conceived the metaphor of a war of information, which contributed to the developing conceptualisation of a literal war against China in the years before actual military action.

Breaking the Soft Border

A third force at play in the British maritime public sphere, an inadvertent participant neither anti-war nor pro-war, was the ‘Canton system’. More than the physical border of the Thirteen Factories (Canton’s foreign trading quarters), the Canton system was primarily a ‘soft border’ made of a series of rules and regulations that constrained British merchants’ activities in China and restricted their interaction with Qing subjects. Soft borders here were figurative borderlines on the maritime frontier that cut through transnational information and interaction networks. By preventing interactions other than those necessary for trade, the Qing believed they had successfully prevented the possibility of foreigners joining forces with Chinese rebels—the dynasty’s major threat. The security order in Canton was paramount to the Qing ruling class. However, the Warlike party believed it necessary to start a war to abolish the system that confined British trade expansion and insulted the British Empire.

The Regret of a Nation

The Warlike party did not get its way entirely. To further elaborate the history of the Pacific party’s efforts in arguing against the war, this chapter shows how the British public opposed the war. Anti-war arguments in the London print media, drawn from Christian universalism and Enlightenment humanitarianism, were often discussed in one breath and became inseparable. Even before the British expedition arrived in China in the summer of 1840, the war was already being called an ‘Opium War’ by the anti-war campaigners, which has stuck ever since. Their opinion of the war prevailed in the second half of the 19th century. After 1860, while British imperial expansion worldwide continued, British parliamentarians, more often than not, condemned the war, and regretting that the ‘Opium War’ was ever waged.

Reasoning Britain into a War

The Warlike party believed it had the right to petition both the Chinese and British governments to have its voice heard and to obtain the justice it deserved. In this spirit, which seemed to be a product of enlightenment but was actually imperialism, the party engaged the Chinese government and went to London to lobby for war in 1835 and 1839. They met with Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston and finally won his support in late 1839. They supplied him with a war strategy and, crucially, with knowledge of the weakness of Chinese military defences, which suggested that the war was easily winnable. Not many in London or the West had the means, at the time, to know China better than the British merchants of Canton. The military intelligence they supplied made a difference in the war decision. Britain fought and won the First Opium War, according to the plan the Warlike party supplied, prompting Palmerston, famously, to express his thanks to key Warlike party member William Jardine for the ‘assistance and information . . . so handsomely afforded’. The Nanking Treaty, signed after the war in 1842, fulfilled the demands that merchants had discussed in their maritime public sphere.

The Warlike and Pacific Parties

This chapter describes how the British community in Canton used its English-language press (newspapers and journals published in Canton) to debate China, Britain and free trade. The Warlike party gradually settled on a new perspective of China that was understood in terms of war, while the Pacific party denounced the war rhetoric. The Pacific party saw Britain primarily as a Christian nation of peace. The Warlike party’s aggressive imperialistic discourse became marked when compared to the peace argument of the Pacific party.