Reasons for Opium Wars - Essay Example

Even though opium was a familiar product in the Chinese land, by the eighteenth-century shoppers appeared to be looking for stronger products. Over the eighteenth century, usage of tropical, addictive, and alcoholic products spread all over the world. Traders along with the product makers found ways to create seductive products less costly, more robust, and more acquirable. The key contribution of Britain to this business was to produce opium at a very low cost and of pure variety on plantations in their freshly acquired Bengal. Later, that they prolonged production to Patna in addition to Benares upstream the Ganges.

Hostilities
China’s Lin Zexu defied the western Imperialists when he struck two actions. The first seemed to be a spectacular public drama, the damage, in 1839, of large quantities of opium which he required the British to turn over to him. The second act seemed to be restrained nearly to the point of invisibility. Lin addressed two letters to the young Queen Victoria, recounting the damage attributable to the “poison” of opium urging her to put the illicit and immoral trade to an end. Lin wrongly presumed that this sale of opium seemed to be forbidden in Britain; and in any case, the queen did not receive his fervent entreaty. One of this correspondence arrived in London, in January 1840. It was carried by a British captain who was never recognized by the foreign office.

The apparent triumph of Lin in June 1839 finally turned to be a delusion since the British, in their demand of retaliation and redress, seized the destruction of opium. Although Britain established and managed its empire throughout the world by relying on the subject peoples, the visual record fails to draw attention to the polyglot character regarding “British forces” throughout China.

The debate around the vice of opium compared to this advantage of cost-free industry gotten to some sort of crescendo within Parliament, and also Foreign Secretary Palmerston restarted his practical concerns. The warfare was on, and after the British fleet’s arrival, the British relocated easily to state their authority and demand, among other things, compensation for the arrested opium, abolition of the restrictive Canton trade process, and also occupy one or more islands. Elliot avoided facing the Chinese forces that Lin put together at Canton. Instead, this individual imposed her own naval blockade and advanced northwards of the coastline using a percentage of his forces, together with Charles Elliot, England’s key diplomat on this scene.

Chinese were imprisoned and those who escaped this tempest were subjected to suffering from petty humiliation of a kind, well-known through the total lifetime of the warfare amid victorious British Isles troopers. This signified a shift of global power. The opium wars were of great triumph in England for even the western notion of commercial and technological development. Read More