Drugs, empire, and international law: British debates over the First Opium War, 1839-1842

Abstract

This thesis examines the various, multifaceted ways in which early Victorian Britons engaged with a series of arguments and imageries regarding China, the opium trade, and the First Opium War (1839-1842). British commercial and diplomatic activity in the Far East was heavily intertwined with the sale of opium in China, against which the Chinese government launched a series of suppression campaigns in the late 1830s. Upon the outbreak of the First Opium War, the British Whig government of Lord Melbourne attempted to 'package' the conflict in a certain way, situating it in terms of property rights, international justice, and natural law. The legal issues and implications of the First Opium War have been neglected in the historiography, which has distorted the way in which Western historians have studied nineteenth-century China. The contingencies of the opium crisis, influenced by economic interests, party politics, and representation of past injuries and national honour, provided an opportunity for parliamentarians across all parties to push for a military solution to the problem. This legalistic justification found some contemporary adherents, but many others criticised the government for its role in the Far East, and for its involvement in the sale of a dangerous, habit-forming narcotic. The debate, which found its outlet in parliamentary debates, newspapers, journals, ephemera, petitions, and public meetings, showed that the British government was subject to a broad-based critique over its complicity in the opium traffic, and the war that was waged in order to uphold British commercial activity and prestige in the Far East.