Creating the Opium War

British imperial attitudes towards China, 1792–1840

Hao Gao

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526133441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Creating the Opium War examines British imperial attitudes towards China during their early encounters from the Macartney embassy to the outbreak of the Opium War – a deeply consequential event which arguably reshaped relations between China and the West in the next century. It makes the first attempt to bring together the political history of Sino-western relations and the cultural studies of British representations of China, as a new way of explaining the origins of the conflict. The book focuses on a crucial period (1792–1840), which scholars such as Kitson and Markley have recently compared in importance to that of American and French Revolutions. By examining a wealth of primary materials, some in more detail than ever before, this study reveals how the idea of war against China was created out of changing British perceptions of the country.

Part I
The embassies

Chapter One
The Macartney embassy

The Macartney embassy of 1792–4, also known as the Macartney mission, was the first official encounter between Britain and China, the greatest Western and Eastern powers in the late eighteenth century. After the War of American Independence concluded in 1783, significant changes occurred in the structure of the British Empire. Growing importance was attached to Asia, and the trade with China became increasingly important for the expansion of British commerce overseas. Nevertheless, from the mid-seventeenth century, the imperial government of China began to apply a highly restrictive policy to its foreign trade. In 1757, the Qing court further confined the country's external trade to a small area outside the city of Canton and restricted it to being conducted through a handful of authorised merchants. This so-called ‘Canton system’ resulted in a trade balance unfavourable to the British. On the one hand, the fact that Britain had no access to the wider Chinese market made it almost impossible for the British to import into China the same manufactured products that were sold in India. On the other hand, since China accepted only silver and gold as payment for its products, and had little demand for British goods, an ever-increasing desire for Chinese tea in Britain resulted in a drain of precious metals from the country. Meanwhile, in Britain, the theories of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham promoted the benefits of free trade. The free competition and reciprocity of trade were deemed beneficial not only to the British but to the whole of humankind. Government control over commerce, such as the Canton system of China, became more and more unacceptable to British manufacturers and merchants, who were keen to open up new markets for their products. In these circumstances, a British embassy was first formed in 1788 to travel to the imperial court of China, with the object of gaining greater trade rights and even establishing Western-style diplomatic relations with the Qing.¹ It was called off, however, because of the sudden death of the ambassador, Charles Cathcart, before he reached Chinese waters. Shortly after that, another embassy was appointed by the British government – this time led by Lord George Macartney. Macartney had experience dealing with an autocratic ruler, Catherine II, when he was Britain's envoy to Russia in 1764. He also served as the governor of Madras (now Chennai) from 1781 to 1785 and was believed to be somewhat familiar with ‘oriental’ diplomacy. Considered as the most suitable diplomat to lead the mission, Macartney set sail with his embassy on 26 September 1792 from Spithead, England.

The standard narrative of the Macartney embassy's experience in China is as follows. In June 1793, the embassy arrived in China with various presents from the British monarch, George III, including a range of state-of-the-art scientific apparatus. Under the pretext of wishing to pay respects to the Qianlong emperor (1711–99, r. 1735–96) on his eighty-second birthday, the embassy was granted an imperial audience at the emperor's summer resort of Jehol (Rehe, now Chengde) in September. The Qing court at this time had little idea of Western diplomacy or the principle of free trade. In this context, Macartney failed to launch any official negotiation on the commercial and diplomatic objectives of the embassy. Instead, his refusal, or at least reluctance, to perform kowtow, a ceremony that involves kneeling and knocking the forehead against the floor, before the emperor created much controversy. According to the British accounts, the Qianlong emperor made a compromise in allowing Macartney to kneel upon only one knee, but no such record can be found from the archives of the Qing. The later Jiaqing emperor (1760–1820, r. 1796–1820) claimed that Macartney did kowtow and he had witnessed the occasion. No matter whose words are true, shortly after the imperial audience, Macartney received strong hints that the embassy should leave Beijing immediately, as its official business had been concluded. In early October, Macartney felt obliged to request permission to depart from the Chinese capital. Although the Qing government treated the British very well during the embassy's return journey across China (partly to prevent them from causing trouble), none of its primary goals had been achieved.

As a monumental event in the history of Sino-Western encounters, the Macartney embassy has attracted extensive scholarship, especially since the early 1990s when its bicentennial anniversary was commemorated by researchers from China and the West. To appreciate its significance, some historians have maintained that it marked a missed opportunity for China to move towards some kind of accommodation with the West,² while others have argued that its failure was due to a clash of world views which were almost irreconcilable.³ In particular, the issue of the kowtow ceremony was in the forefront of scholarly attention. The well-known debate between James Hevia and Joseph Esherick has prompted widespread discussion in both Western and Chinese academia to research and interpret the court ritual of the Qing.⁴ As a result of this literature, culture and ritual were placed by historians at the heart of the scholarship on the Macartney embassy for an extended period of time. Meanwhile, scholars slowly but gradually realised the need to go beyond the study of the kowtow controversy. Joanna Waley-Cohen and Maxine Berg have paid attention to the presents offered to the Qing court by the Macartney embassy. The former concentrates on how the Qing perceived British science and technology in the late eighteenth century,⁵ while the latter discusses the attitudes of British manufacturers and government officials towards their own products and technologies.⁶ In recent years, William Christie and Logan Collins have explored how the Macartney embassy and the images of China were presented in British periodicals.⁷ Both of them are interested in the process in which British writers, editors and reviewers at home helped mediate the embassy's findings about China. Henrietta Harrison, in her outstanding paper published in American Historical Review, has added that archivists were also important ‘co-creators’ of history in the choices they made about what to keep and what to exclude from the archive.⁸ That the Macartney embassy has been remembered and researched in the present ways, according to Harrison, is partly because the issue of diplomatic protocol was a key concern in the culture of eighteenth-century Britain,⁹ partly because the political context of early twentieth-century China, the editors’ preoccupations and the structure of the archive itself heavily influenced the Chinese archivists’ decision in the 1920s on what documents were to be released about the embassy.

Despite this rich literature, there is still room to study further the Macartney embassy and what it meant to the development of Sino-British relations. Notably, in terms of British imagination of China, contemporary scholars have recognised that it became increasingly critical from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but they have not reached consensus on when exactly the balance between favourable and unfavourable views began to shift from the former to the latter. Song-Chuan Chen has ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Studies in Imperialism
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The embassies
• Part II: Prelude to the Opium War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index