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Analysis of the opium wars
Opium wars of the 19th century
Anglo Chinese Opium War
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The Opium Wars emerged from China’s attempts to suppress the opium trade, enforced by foreign imperialism. During the late 1700s, foreign merchants traded opium grown in India for Chinese tea, making big profits. China had accepted the trade for brief period until it became addictive and disruptive to the Chinese economy, to which the Chinese government outlawed opium and executed drug dealers. They demanded the trade to stop but by the right of free trade, refused to halt. Infuriated, Chinese warships were sent and clashed with the British fleet, triggering the Opium War. Due to advances in weaponry, the Chinese were easily defeated and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing, which stated that Britain will receive indemnities from China, the
Indirectly, tea had a devastating social impact on China, as it led to the huge trade of Opium. As much as ten percent of the Chinese population (over forty million) were regular users of opium. China consumed ninety five percent of the world’s Opium supply. This had a devastating social impact on them because majority of the citizens there were addicted to it. Economically, because of the huge amounts of Opium that were imported into China, they could not export enough goods to equalize, causing the outflow of silver from China to Europe. The political impact in China included government attempts to stop the illegal trade of Opium (due to the social use of it) resulted in the blockading of European trading areas there. Britain retaliated, causing the Opium wars, through which, because of the British victory, Britain gained far greater access to the Chinese market and increased trading privileges. This also lead to Chinese workers being taken to the new world. Doing this introduced cheap labor to the new world. The Company’s need for tea in Europe, and the lack of Chinese interest in other British goods, led to the production of Opium in Bengal (by the British). This Opium was then traded with China in return for tea. By 1750, the East India Company established control over India's opium cultivation. The British exported the opium to China, which
After the U.S gained their independence form Britain, they faced the greatest obstacle that would threaten their independence. This was a second war fought against Great Britain called the War of 1812. The war was fought on land and on sea and lasted almost three years. There were many forces that led Americans to declare war on Britain in 1812.
Allingham,, Philip V. "England and China: The Opium Wars, 1839-60." The Victorian Web: An Overview. 24 June 2006. Web. 06 Apr. 2011.
At the end of the eighteenth century, China’s goods were much desired by Britain. However, the Chinese saw Europeans as savages and did not want to trade with them. During trade, there was an imbalance in China’s favor, because the Europeans were forced to buy Chinese goods using silver. The Western Imperialists began to grow opium poppies from in India, and then smuggle them into China. China soon became addicted to the drug and spent most of it’s money on the purchase of it from the Europeans and Americans. This shifted the balance of power to be in Europe’s favor.
In paragraphs 3-5 of the letter, Lin addresses the issue that caused him to initially reach out to the ruler of Britain; the smuggling and selling of opium in China through British merchants. The selling and smoking of opium has caused great harm to the Chinese people in the eyes of the Chinese emperor, therefor Commissioner Lin Zexu has been sent to put an end to it. He explains the punishment for the Chinese who smoke and sell opium and notes that the emperor will extended the same punishment to British merchants who continue to sell this drug to the Chinese people. Lin manage to confiscate a large amount of opium through the help of the British superintendent of trade, Charles Elliot. With Charles Elliot being in cooperation with Lin Zexu, it serves as a warning because the Qing dynasty had created new regulations; being if any Britain was found selling opium, he would receive the same punishment as would a Chinese. In order to carry them out, he needed this help o...
Although it was illegal, many of the money hungry merchants excepted the opium in return for the things that were valuable to the English. Because of this, the first Anglo-Chinese war erupted. China underestimated the power of England and was defeated. At the end of the war, they were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing (1842). The treaty was one of the first treaties known as the “Unfair Treaties.”
The nineteenth century witnessed the most explosive episode in the history of the tea trade: the Opium Wars. This turmoil centered on economic and outright military conflict between the British Empire and the Chinese. The strength of the tea trade in Western Europe by the mid-seventeenth century led to numerous attempts to supplant the dependency on China with European plantations. Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, led this cause, participating in multiple failed attempts to retrieve and grow tea from China. For the tea-drinking Europeans, China remained their lifeline, something Britain hoped to change. The Seven Years' War (1756-63) and the American War of Independence (1775-83) extinguished the East India Company's silver reserves, which until that point had been the goods used to purchase tea from the Chinese. Vi...
The president that played the most significant role in the Vietnam War was president Richard Nixon. Nixon took the U.S. out of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War lasted throughout (Nov. 1, 1955 – Apr. 30, 1975). The Vietnam War was fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam over communism. Communism is a society where nobody is better or richer than you are, where everyone works together and shares in the products of their labor, and where the government creates a safety net of guaranteed employment and medical care for all. The US at the moment, was also going through the Cold War and the US felt like they were losing the over the spread of communism as China, and the trend was spreading to other nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well. The US disliked the idea of the spread of communism, which meant the US would be allies with South Vietnam in the Vietnam War. Overall, it was not a successful war for South Vietnam and the US as North Vietnam defeated the South. Throughout the war there was More than 3 million people were killed including 58,000 U.S. military fatal casualties and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. Vietnam became a unified communist country.
The Industrial Revolution brought social change and economic growth for Great Britain. This era provided the perfect environment for a new social class to emerge from urban squalor. During the Industrial Revolution a group of citizens who breathed polluted air, drank toxic water, worked fourteen-hour days in dimly lit factories and lived in close quarters. This group is known as the working class. In Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party he predicted that the development of Modern Industry cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie (the upper class) produces and appropriates products. The bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat (the working class) are equally inevitable (Marx, 5). However Marx’s predict revolution of the working class never comes to be in England. It is a wonder why a large social group composed of a huge majority of a countries population never triggered rebellion within the cities streets. A huge contributing factor of the era was the large amounts of mind-altering “drugs” readily available to the nations poorer peoples. If it wasn’t for the Industrial Revolution, we may not have been as technologically advanced in the modern world. However, opium provided the solution to all of these men and their troubles. Opium created an escape and made life tolerable for working class preventing them from rebelling, making the industrial revolution successful.
Hanes, William Travis, and Frank Sanello. Opium Wars: the Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another. Naperville, IL: Source, 2002. Print.
Life for Fariba Nawa after 18 years was an eye opener and a very tragic experience. Nawa coined a way to narrate a story of an Afghan society, she once knew. The multibillion drug trade now ruled her country. In 1999 they made between $25 million and $75 million just from taxing opium farmers and traffickers (106). It was surrounded with opium, crime, smugglers and opium brides. Opium brides were sold to traffickers to pay off a pervious opium debt. The opium have taken over and damaged the lives of many Afghanistan residents.
When Afghanistan was beginning its formation as a nation in the 1700s, two of that era’s major world powers were advancing toward Afghanistan: Britain westward from India and Russia moving eastward. “England was busy conquering India between 1757 and 1857, Visalli writes, “and Russia was spreading its control east, and was on Afghanistan’s border by 1828.” One of the most lucrative products that England exported from its new colony, India, was opium and by 1770 Britain had a monopoly on opium production in India and saw to it that cultivation spread into Afghanistan as well (the boundary between the two was ill-defined until 1893). In 1859, England took control of all Afghan territory between the Indus River and the Hindu Kush, including Baluchistan, denying Afghanistan access to the sea. England invaded Afghanistan again in 1878, overthrew the ruling monarch, and forced the new government to become a British protectorate, i.e., rendering Afghanistan dependent on and under the rule of the British monarch, subjected to war, plunder, land grab, economic/development crippling, occupation.
During this period, Qing officials overlooked the foreign brokers. By the early 1800’s, however, Great Britain began bartering for Chinese goods in non-monetary funds, opium.... ... middle of paper ... ... The Chinese culture witnessed poverty, social unrest, drug addictions, and government bankruptcy when foreign exploitation emerged.
The Opium War The Opium War, directed by Jin Xie, paints a rather impartial account of the Opium War, starting with the appointment of Lin Zexu to end the opium trade in China to the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. This film seemed to fairly depict the faults of both the Chinese and the British during the 1830’s and up to 1842. That said, the Opium War illustrated two important factors that both helped to promote the conflict and eventual military confrontation between China and Britain. The first is the state of the Chinese government at the time of the opium trade. There was enough corruption within the government itself that it was very difficult to halt trading at its source.
The start of this war was when China wanted to end all trades with the British that contained any opium.