Academic literature on the topic 'China Opium War of 1840-1842'
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Journal articles on the topic "China Opium War of 1840-1842"
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Ti, Haowei, Zhiyun Hu, and Gang Bian. "Comparison between Sino-US Trade War and the Opium War of the Qing Dynasty." International Journal of Trade, Economics and Finance 12, no. 2 (April 2021): 58–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.18178/ijtef.2021.12.2.694.
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The Sino-US trade war has become more and more fierce. From March 2018 to the present, China and the United States have begun to constantly increase tariffs and restrict each other. Negotiations are still going on and it seems that no real progress has been made. Soybean procurement, sanctions against Huawei, chip battles, intellectual property wars, and technology transfer have been escalated, and both sides of the trade have been affected to varying degrees. At the end of 2019, if all the tariffs in the Trump plan were implemented, it meant that almost all goods from China (worth about $550 billion) would be subject to punitive tariffs. First Opium War‘ Britain often called it the first Sino-British war or "commercial war". It was a war of aggression launched by Britain from China from 1840 to 1842, and it was also the beginning of modern Chinese history. In 1840, the British government used Lin Zexu's Humen cigarettes as an excuse to decide to send the expeditionary forces to invade China. In June 1840, the British warships arrived in the Pearl River Estuary in Guangdong, blocking the seaport, and the Opium War began. The Chinese and British sides signed the "Nanjing Treaty", the first unequal treaty in Chinese history. China began to rip land, indemnify, and negotiate tariffs to foreign countries. The Nanjing Treaty seriously endangered China's sovereignty. China began to become a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society, losing its independent status and promoting the disintegration of the natural economy.
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Guotu, Zhuang. "Tea, Silver, Opium and War: From Commercial Expansion to Military Invasion." Itinerario 17, no. 2 (July 1993): 10–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0165115300024384.
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Sino-Western relations in the eighteenth century mainly found their expression in a particular mode of commercial transactions in Canton. The structure of the Western trade with China was based on silver and colonial products from India and the Malay archipelago, like silver, cotton, pepper, lead. These commodities were exchanged for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain by the mediation of the so-called Hong trades. As long as the trade structure was kept in balance the Westerners were able to make large profits and commercial relations remained the same. When the trade structure fell out balance through, for instance, a shortage of silver or the prohibition of opium smuggling, the Western powers resorted to force. The discontinuation of the traditional Sino-Western trade because of an imbalance in the trade structure eventually did not lead to the decline of trade, but to military conquest: the Opium War in 1840. This War enabled the Westerners, headed by the English, to revamp the structure of their trade with China on their own terms and forced the Chinese government into acceptance. Since then the process of the Western expansion into China was characterised by commercial expansion, military show of force and political control. In this essay I would like to analyze how the traditional structure of Sino-Western trade lost its equilibrium and to study the changing character of European expansion into China as a result of this imbalance during the period of 1740-1840.
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Melancon, Glenn. "Honour in Opium? The British Declaration of War on China, 1839–1840." International History Review 21, no. 4 (December 1999): 855–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07075332.1999.9640880.
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Bruner, Jason. "Inquiring into Empire: Princeton Seminary’s Society of Inquiry on Missions, the British Empire, and the Opium Trade, Ca. 1830‐1850." Mission Studies 27, no. 2 (2010): 194–219. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157338310x536438.
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AbstractPrinceton Seminary was intimately involved in the North American foreign missions movement in the nineteenth century. One remarkable dimension of this involvement came through the student-led Society of Inquiry on Missions, which sought to gather information about the global state of the Christian mission enterprise. This paper examines the Society’s correspondence with Protestant missionaries in China regarding their attitudes to the British Empire in the years 1830‐1850. It argues that the theological notion of providence informed Princetonians’ perceptions of the world, which consequently dissociated the Christian missionary task with any particular nation or empire. An examination of the Society of Inquiry’s correspondence during the mid-nineteenth century reveals much about Protestant missionaries and their interactions with the opium trade and the results of the First Opium War (1839‐1842). Princetonians’ responses to the opium trade and the First Opium War led ultimately to a significant critique of western commercial influence in East Asia. In conclusion, this paper questions the extent to which commerce, empire, and Christian missions were inherently associated in nineteenth century American Protestant missionary activity.
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Turner, I. M. "Natural history publications arising from Theodore Cantor's visit to Chusan, China, in 1840." Archives of Natural History 43, no. 1 (April 2016): 30–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/anh.2016.0344.
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In 1840, Theodore Edward Cantor, nephew of Nathaniel Wallich, served as an assistant surgeon with the British forces on an expedition to China during the First Opium War. Cantor, a keen naturalist, was requested to use the opportunity to collect natural history specimens for the East India Company. Despite only spending four months on Chusan (Zhoushan), Cantor managed to amass a considerable number of specimens on the voyage and during the time in China. Cantor sought assistance from William Griffith with the identification of the plants, Edward Blyth with the birds, William Benson with the molluscs and Frederick Hope with the insects. Cantor published an account of Chusan and its fauna in Annals and magazine of natural history in 1842, but he also submitted the work to the Asiatic Society of Bengal to be published in Asiatick researches with many coloured plates and a chapter on the plants by William Griffith. The cost and slow progress with producing the plates contributed to the demise of Asiatick researches and the failure to publish the Chusan report as intended. William Griffith's paper on the botany was issued in a small number of preprints paginated either from 1 or from 33 in late 1844 or very early 1845. Sets of the twelve hand-coloured lithograph plates that were completed were issued with proof copies of pp 1–32 representing the introductory material written by Cantor as Zoology of Chusan, probably in 1847.
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McLean, D. "Surgeons of The Opium War: The Navy on the China Coast, 1840-42." English Historical Review CXXI, no. 491 (April 1, 2006): 487–504. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cel005.
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Tamar Van, Rachel. "The “Woman Pigeon”." Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 4 (2014): 561–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/phr.2014.83.4.561.
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Prior to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, Chinese officials prohibited the presence of foreign women in China. While many Chinese regulations concerning foreign merchants and missionaries were not enforced, this rule was. In 1830 and again in the 1840s, in the aftermath of the first Opium War, clusters of British and American families traveled up the Pearl River to the factories that housed visiting merchants in Canton (Guangzhou). On both occasions, trouble ensued. But the conflicts may not have been all they seemed. This article suggests that foreign women did have the potential to be a problem in China, less because of inherent cultural differences than because both Chinese officials and Western merchants used Western women to embody a boundary between peoples.
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Shuyong, Liu. "Hong Kong: A Survey of its Political and Economic Development over the Past 150 Years." China Quarterly 151 (September 1997): 583–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s030574100004683x.
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Hong Kong has been part of Chinese territory since ancient times. Before the British occupation, Hong Kong had achieved considerable development in agriculture, fisheries, the salt industry, transportation, cultural undertakings and education. It was by no means a desolate and barren land at that time. British troops occupied Hong Kong Island on 25 January 1841 during the Opium War. In August 1842, the British government formally annexed Hong Kong Island by forcing the Qing government to conclude the Sino-British Treaty of Nanking. In the Second Opium War, British troops forcibly occupied Kowloon in 1860. In October the same year, the British government annexed Kowloon after forcing the Qing government to conclude the Sino-British Convention of Peking. When imperialist powers were locked in their bid to carve up and grab spheres of influence in China, Britain again forced the Qing government into signing the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory in June 1898 by which it leased a large expanse of Chinese territory south of Shenzhen River and north of Boundary Street and some 235 islands, renamed later as the “New Territories,” thus achieving its occupation and control over the entire Hong Kong region.
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CHEN, SONGCHUAN. "An Information War Waged by Merchants and Missionaries at Canton: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 1834–1839." Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (December 5, 2011): 1705–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x11000771.
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AbstractThis paper explores the efforts and impact of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China (1834–1839), which existed during the five years before the First Opium War. It contends that the Society represented a third form of British engagement with the Chinese, alongside the diplomatic attempts of 1793 and 1816, and the military conflict of 1839–1842. The Society waged an ‘information war’ to penetrate the information barrier that the Qing had established to contain European trade and missions. The foreigners in Canton believed they were barred from further access to China because the Chinese had no information on the true character of the Europeans. Thus, they prepared ‘intellectual artillery’ in the form of Chinese language publications, especially on world geography, to distribute among the Chinese, in the hope that this effort would familiarize the Chinese with the science and art of Westerners and thereby cultivate respect and a welcoming atmosphere. The war metaphor was conceived, and the information war was waged, in the periphery of the British informal empire in Canton, but it contributed to the conceptualization of war against China, both in Canton and in Britain, in the years before actual military action. Behind the rhetoric of war and knowledge diffusion in Canton, lay a convergence of interests between merchants and missionaries, which drove both to employ information and military power to further their shared aim of opening China up for trade and proselytizing.
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Kwan, C. Nathan. "“Barbarian Ships Sail Freely about the Seas”: Qing Reactions to the British Suppression of Piracy in South China, 1841–1856." Asian Review of World Histories 8, no. 1 (February 6, 2020): 83–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22879811-12340065.
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Abstract Chinese piracy presented numerous problems for the Qing and British empires in Chinese waters, but cooperation against pirates was rare before 1842. The colonization of Hong Kong and other treaty arrangements after the Opium War enabled the British to take more vigorous action against Chinese pirates. Although such actions impinged on China’s maritime sovereignty and jurisdiction, Qing officials quickly recognized the efficacy of British naval forces in suppressing piracy. Hong Kong and Kowloon developed a system of cooperation for the suppression of piracy. This system was replicated elsewhere along the coast of Guangdong and beyond. By receiving captured pirates from the Royal Navy, Qing officials effectively used an important tool of British imperialism as a means of enforcing and extending their own authority. At the same time, cooperation became a means for the Qing to engage with emerging international law.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "China Opium War of 1840-1842"
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Luk, Gary Chi-hung. "The Opium War, overlapping empires, and China's water borders." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7390858e-60d2-4b92-9cff-156ea7d763f8.
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This thesis explains the relationships between the British Expedition to China, the Qing state, and the Chinese maritime and river population during the Opium War (1839-1842). Drawing on scholarship on borderlands and frontiers as well as a variety of textual and visual sources, the thesis argues that the Opium War transformed vast coastal and waterway regions in Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu provinces into what can be conceptualized as "water borders." These water borders were initially characterized by the existence of the Qing Empire's sea frontier, where the Qing rulers, with the "inner-outer paradigm" in mind, strove to maintain control over those labeled as "outer barbarians," "Han evildoers," "villainous fishers," and the "Dan." The rise of a British wartime frontier in China and its adverse effects on local transportation as well as Chinese regional and international trade, however, destabilized southeast China's socioeconomic order. With the Qing forces weakened, Chinese piracy was unleashed, and given limited British naval power, there was an absence of any militarily hegemonic power in southeast China's waters. The British occupation and naval blockade, moreover, resulted in the emergence of overlaps and interstices of the Qing and British empires. On the one hand, the British Expedition and the Qing state conflicted over managing Chinese merchant craft and their trade. On the other hand, subject to neither Qing nor British control, many Chinese people living along the coast and rivers took advantage of the wartime opportunities and expanded their activities and networks to fissures of Qing control and the newly opened interstitial space. The thesis engages with Opium War studies by 're-reorienting' the war toward the coast and revealing the war's three "inner" aspects, namely the Qing efforts to "tame" the sea frontier, British rule in wartime China, and the Qing-British conflicts over controlling Chinese littoral people. The thesis, moreover, contributes to scholarship on late imperial and modern Chinese littoral societies. It argues that while the war marked the beginning of an unprecedented-scale interaction of Chinese coastal and riverine people with Westerners in China, the evolution of Chinese littoral societies during the war was in fact a continuation of the preceding centuries. The Opium War, the thesis argues, brought about one of the most dramatic political-social upheavals in late imperial littoral China. Furthermore, the thesis revisits British imperialism in late imperial and modern China by looking at the origins of the British "formal empire," limitations of British power, and wartime aids of the "indigenous" population for the British. The thesis also reassesses the significance of the Opium War in the history of the Qing Empire. It argues that for the Qing state, its anti-opium campaign and anti-British war in 1839-1842 constituted one of the recurrent threats on the maritime frontier for the empire's first two centuries. It also highlights some aspects of similarities and linkage of the Qing Empire's maritime and inland borders. Furthermore, the thesis reevaluates the Qing's state capacity during the Opium War and in the following years, highlighting its partial ability to control the empire's littorals. Last but not least, the water border framework constructed in the thesis serves to underscore some aspects of continuity in the political and socioeconomic development of late imperial southeast China, and to facilitate comparison between different frontiers in the Qing Empire, Southeast Asia, and beyond.
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Gao, Hao. "British-Chinese encounters : changing perceptions and attitudes from the Macartney mission to the Opium War (1792-1840)." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/26040.
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This thesis examines British-Chinese encounters in the half century before the Opium War, an under-researched medium term period that had profound consequences for both China and Britain. Unlike previous studies on China’s early relations with Britain or the West, this thesis is conducted closely from a perceptional point of view, with its principal focus on British people’s first-hand impressions of China and attitudes towards Chinese affairs as a result of these encounters. It shows that British perceptions of China, by and large, increasingly worsened throughout this period. During the two royal embassies to China, British observers from the Macartney and the Amherst missions presented similarly negative views of Chinese civilisation, but proposed conflicting measures in terms of realising Britain’s commercial and diplomatic objectives in China. In the run up to the Opium War in the 1830s, the image of a Chinese government manipulated by a capricious and despotic monarchy was gradually constructed and seen as the primary cause of China’s backwardness. China was hence increasingly envisioned as an isolated ‘other’ that could not be communicated with by appeals to reason or through normal diplomatic negotiations. In this context, a coercive line of action, supported by British naval force, was eventually regarded as a just and viable approach to promote the wellbeing of both British and Chinese common people. Although these developing unfavourable views about China did not determine the outbreak of the Opium War, they were certainly important underlying forces without which open hostilities with China would probably have been neither justifiable nor acceptable to the British parliament or people. This thesis also seeks to set this half-century of British-Chinese encounters in the context of Chinese history. It briefly describes how a changing image of Britain was developed by the Chinese government and people during this period. It shows that both local elites in the southeastern coastal areas and the elites at the imperial court in Beijing obtained credible as well as inaccurate information about Britain and its people. These early notions held in the southeast and in the Beijing sometimes had an impact on each other, but sometimes stayed distinct and unaffected. This situation partly explains why the Chinese government was caught off guard when a serious challenge from Britain occurred in the form of the Opium War.
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Song, Lin Feng. "The neutral policies of the Portuguese government of Macao during the Opium Wars." Thesis, University of Macau, 2000. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b1636592.
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Leung, Chung Yan. "A bilingual British "barbarian" : a study of John Robert Morrison (1814-1843) as the translator and interpreter for the British plenipotentiaries in China between 1839 and 1843." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2001. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/305.
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Martínez, Robles David. "La participación española en el proceso de penetración occidental en China: 1840-1870." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/7466.
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Esta tesis se ha centrado en el desarrollo de las relaciones entre China y España en el contexto de penetración occidental en China desde la firma del Tratado de Nanjing (1842) hasta el final de la década de 1860. España fue un actor secundario en este proceso, pero sus relaciones con el imperio Chino muestran que algunas de las suposiciones de la historiografía más clásica sobre el mismo son demasiado limitadas y restringidas.A mediados de siglo XIX España era una nación en crisis y carecía de los recursos necesarios para tomar parte activa en las acciones occidentales en China. No obstante, su presencia en territorio chino le permitió implicarse de manera indirecta en acontecimientos capitales como las guerras del opio o la Rebelión de los Taiping, negociar en términos similares a los empleados por otros países como la Gran Bretaña o Francia por la obtención de un tratado; e incluso un agente español fue escogido por el Zongli yamen para actuar como representante del gobierno chino en un país europeo.
The main focus of this dissertation is the relationship between China and Spain in the context of the process of foreign penetration in China from the signature of the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) to the end of 1860s. Spain was a minor actor in this process, but her relations with the Chinese empire demonstrate that some of the classical historiographical approaches are too narrow and restricted.
In the 19th century, Spain was a nation in crisis and it lacked the resources to take a leading role in the Western imperial actions in China. Nevertheless, the Spanish presence in China allowed that country to get indirectly involved in major events like the Opium Wars or the Taiping Rebellion; Spain also became embroiled in the negotiations for a treaty in the same terms than those used for imperial powers like Great Britain; and still a Spaniard was chosen by the Zongli yamen to act as a representative of the Chinese government in a European country.
Books on the topic "China Opium War of 1840-1842"
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The inner Opium War. Cambridge, Mass: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University, 1992.
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Sheng, Hu. From the Opium War to the May Fourth movement. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991.
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Tian chao de beng kui: Ya pian zhan zheng zai yan jiu. 2nd ed. Beijing Shi: Sheng huo, du shu, xin zhi San lian shu dian, 2005.
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Hong, Ou, ed. Liang ci ya pian zhan zheng yu Xianggang de ge rang: Shi shi he shi liao = The Opium Wars and the cession of Hong Kong : a documentary history. Taibei: Guo shi guan, 1998.
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Yiyi, Zhu, ed. Ya pian zhan zheng de zai ren shi. Xianggang: Zhong wen da xue chu ban she, 2003.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "China Opium War of 1840-1842"
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Chen, Song-Chuan. "The Regret of a Nation." In Merchants of War and Peace. Hong Kong University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390564.003.0007.
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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.
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Cox, Thomas H. "‘Money, Credit, and Strong Friends’." In The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700-1840. Hong Kong University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390939.003.0009.
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Warren Delano represents a typical trader who needed more than moral integrity to keep him away from the opium trade. Arriving in Canton for the first time in 1834, Delano was lured to China by a commercial culture that unofficially tolerated opium smuggling. The openness of Canton in carrying out trade also proved to be its weakness, because before 1836, it was relatively easy to become involved in contraband. With substantial profits to be made and little risk of getting caught, employees of Russell and Company, as well as numerous others, had no reservations about participating in the trade. The change in Chinese and American attitudes toward the opium trade during the First Opium War forced Delano both to transform the ways in which he did business and to relocate his enterprises to Macao in the early 1840s. He also learned over time to pursue a career that combined ambition with personal connections and the ability to navigate amongst informal kinship- and friendship-based networks. Delano returned to the United States to live in 1846, but after years of financial success, was ruined by the Panic of 1857. He returned to China in 1860 and amassed a new fortune through trading tea, porcelain, and, at times, opium. In 1866, having made a second fortune, he returned permanently to the United States.
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"Translators and Interpreters During the Opium War between Britain and China (1839-1842)." In Translating and Interpreting Conflict, 41–57. Brill | Rodopi, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789401204385_005.
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Johnson, Kendall. "Residing in “South-Eastern Asia” of the Antebellum United States." In Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, 62–90. Hong Kong University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888455775.003.0004.
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In the decades before and after the First Opium War (1839-1842), the US missionary Reverend David Abeel laid out a sense of “South-Eastern Asian” for US readers of Journal of a Residence in China, and the Neighboring Countries, from 1829 to 1833 (1834). His phrase focuses multi-lingual print evangelicalism on an archipelago stretching across networks of opium traffic connecting India to China. His accounts also imply the layers of faiths and languages that shaped senses of geography before the existence of the United States and the convergence of mottled European imperialisms in the China trade. At the end of the war, Abeel moved to the coastal city of Amoy where he rationalized opium commerce as an evil outweighed by the potential benefits of opening treaty ports. The prominent administrator of Fujian and scholar Xú Jìyú (徐繼畬; 1795–1873) disagreed and adapted Abeel’s geographical tools to present a warning about the attempts to evangelize “South-East Asia.” His Yíng huàn zhì lüè (瀛擐志略; General Survey of the Maritime Circuit, a Universal Geography, 1849) portrays Catholic and Protestant commercial activity as a threat to indigenous jurisdiction the world over.
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Chen, Song-Chuan. "Reasoning Britain into a War." In Merchants of War and Peace. Hong Kong University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390564.003.0006.
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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.
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Kim, Kwangmin. "Global Crises of Oasis Capitalism, 1847–64." In Borderland Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9780804799232.003.0006.
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Through the career of Ahmad, a governor of Kashgar in 1850s, this chapter examines how Opium War (1839-1842) and the subsequent discontinuation of the silver transfer from China to the oasis created crisis in both the Qing military financing and oasis capitalism in Central Asia. The oasis capitalists adopted monetary solution to solve the crisis. They developed copper mining and minted local copper currency to compensate for the loss of the silver provision. Its inflationary affect aggravated the economic stratification long underway in the oasis, privileging wealthy merchants and landlords, while worsening the livelihood of the wage earners. In combination with the burden of the labor mobilization imposed on the oasis farmers to work the copper mines, this growing socio-economic tension resulted in increasing local violence and the out-migration of the people from Eastern Turkestan. The Qing empire fell in 1864, amid a new round of khwaja attacks.
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Rosenthal, Gregory. "Boki’s Predicament." In Beyond Hawai'i. University of California Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520295063.003.0002.
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Chapter 1 begins with the opening of a trans-Pacific triangular trade in the 1780s among the United States, China, and Hawaiʻi. Boki was an aliʻi (ruling chief) and kiaʻāina (governor) of Oʻahu who in the 1820s became obsessed with the sandalwood trade and the riches flowing into Hawaiʻi from the Qing Empire of China. The story of Boki’s predicament—how to ensure enough indigenous sandalwood supply to keep pace with Hawaiian leaders’ increasing consumption of foreign goods and their debts owed American merchants—is our entryway into understanding the emergence of the Pacific World as an integrated segment of the global capitalist economy, and one in which Hawaiian workers took center stage. In the 1840s, Western concepts of “free labor” and “free trade” revolutionized the trans-Pacific economy with the imposition of “free trade” on the Qing Empire following the Opium War (1839-1842) and the imposition of a “free labor” ideology in Hawaiian land and legal reforms. By 1850, the Māhele—a process of land privatization and redistribution—had dispossessed the majority of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous people, leading many to seek work abroad or on foreign ships.
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Goldstein, Jonathan. "Nathan Dunn (1782–1844) as Anti-Opium China Trader and Sino-Western Cultural Intermediary." In The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700-1840. Hong Kong University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390939.003.0007.
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American trader Nathan Dunn’s experience as a private China trader shows that one individual can indeed make a difference. A practicing Quaker who refused to buy or sell opium, Dunn pioneered innovative trading strategies while championing a mercantile code that was unusual for his day. At a time when few Americans regarded the opium trade as inappropriate, he showed that it was possible to succeed in the Canton Trade without dealing in opium. Dunn was also a dedicated educator of Chinese culture. He seems to have found his life’s purpose in bringing an understanding of China to English-speaking audiences. Unlike virtually all of his contemporaries except for Robert Waln Jr., his aim was not to trade and get wealthy purely for the sake of personal aggrandizement. Rather, it was to become a self-educated, self-proclaimed advocate for China in the United States and later in the United Kingdom. The wealth that he gained through trade provided funds needed to realize his higher calling. In addition, he was arguably the pioneer of Sinological museology and ethnology in both the United States and Europe. Because of the earnestness and thoroughness of his quest, he elevated both sciences beyond the level of randomly collecting ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Shortly after he established a ‘Chinese Museum’ in Philadelphia in 1838, several other similar museums appeared in America and England, although none were as focussed and all-encompassing or as positively inclined as his.
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Hanser, Jessica. "British Private Traders between India and China." In The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700-1840. Hong Kong University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390939.003.0002.
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During the eighteenth century, China was by no means part of the emerging British empire, formal or informal, but it was on the borderlands of that empire. Within a rapidly changing commercial and political context, British private traders, investors in India and their agents in China created new connections between the subcontinent and the southeast coast of China. In this new commercial system, British private traders reigned supreme. But this revolution was not merely commercial. Rather, a new, predominantly British financial system linking India and China was forged, which ran parallel to other existing networks of Indian-based commission merchants such as those of the Portuguese, Muslims, Armenians, and later, Parsees. However, with these new financial connections came political entanglements. Investors in India and their British agents in China used the coercive power of the British state (without its permission or knowledge) and their own private Indian militia to enforce their contracts with Chinese merchants. Before the rise of aggressive agency houses such as Jardine, Matheson & Company, and the expansion of the nineteenth-century opium trade, eighteenth-century British private traders in search of personal gain drew China into the financial and political orbit of Britain’s burgeoning Asian empire.
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Hellman, Lisa. "The Life and Loves of Michael Grubb." In The Private Side of the Canton Trade, 1700-1840. Hong Kong University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390939.003.0008.
Full textAbstract:
Swedish East India Company and private trader Michael Grubb lived between groups and norms at a time of historical change. He arrived in Canton before the golden age of the Company as a whole (which was the end of the 1770s), but experienced the time when the largest private fortunes were made. He also arrived before the Swedish company had completely established the strict division between company and private trade, but when most trade restrictions were already in place. He was an opium trader before opium dominated the trade, and he also worked as a go-between for different trade groups; this was a role made possible by the considerable freedom that Swedish supercargoes had to conduct private trade, despite tension between private and company interests. Men like Grubb and his Swedish compatriot Jean Abraham Grill also demonstrate the importance of social relations in multinational involvement, and how those relations could both shape the Canton Trade and be shaped by it. In addition, Grubb’s relationship with Macao resident Isabel Jackson provides insight into traders’ relationships with local women. Finally, Grubb’s and Grill’s lives also illustrate the widely varying fates of China traders after their return to their homeland. While Grill invested wisely after returning to Sweden, Grubb squandered his fortune in high-risk business ventures and spent his last years in poverty.