Opium wars and Imperialism

 

Opium import, Gaskell and Imperialism

It is inherent in the analysis and illustration of Barton and his opiate addiction that the imperial trade of opium is recognised. Similarly, to the slavery that contributed to the cotton industry, opium received negative connotations as it was predominately used and supplied by the Chinese sailors that moved to seaport towns such as Liverpool. Although these racist assumptions were associated with opium dens, which Gaskell does not portray, it is important to recognise that these views contributed to the overall perception of opium use in the 19^th-century.

Opium dens – Berridge Oral History

Virginia Berridge, ‘Opium and Oral History’, Oral History Society, 7.2, (1979), pp.48-58.

‘In the dockland areas of ports like Liverpool, Cardiff and London, opium smoking among the Chinese population found a similar local acceptance. The East End Opium Den became a urban myth of people dazed and lolling around, the haunt of vice and crime, had become a popular stereotype since the 1870’s. The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Racial hostility which it embodied contributed to the ‘deviant’ image of opium use being propagated at an official and professional level. Opium sold by a Chinese grocer ‘they bring out a great big quill from some gigantic bird… with a little leaden weight at one end, with a nice silk coloured ribbon on it and a steelyard… and they’ll put your empty on first and they’ll weight your empty, because the empty may be one that they’d made themselves out of lemon skin. they got a lot for 1/6. P.53

The Opium Trade

Bill Schwarz, The Expansion of England, (London: Routledge, 1996)

p.230-250

The rulers of the Middle Kingdom, considered their empire to be self-sufficient in all produce. They had no need for contact with people from outside. The East India Company, established itself at Canton and soon built up a large trade in tea and silks.

The company had established the growing of opium in Bengal in 1773 which they began to supply to China. The government at Peking forbade the import of opium, instead the company sold opium at Calcutta and smuggled it into China by British and Indian merchants trading under license from the Company not in its name.

After the success of the opium trading Heu Nai-tsi recommended that the trade must be legalised, and an import duty charged on opium. This led to war with Britain in 1839, the merchants agitation had brought about the end of the east India company’s trade with China.

The presence of Chinese and Indian sailors in Britain led to a fear of ‘otherness’. Fictionalised through novels such as Hard Times and Edwin Drood. The east end of London where the native British can meet foreign purveyors and users of opium, and thereby lose their innocence, respectability and humanity is the most potent symbol of internal otherness.

The image of the opium den portrays the Chinese owners and importers as foreign devils, the corruptors of the native British. Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ recalls the Chinese man in the opium den ‘with yellow, pasty face, dropping lids, and pin-point pupils… the wreck and ruin of a noble man.’

 

Glenn Cravath, unknown, Pinterest, [accessed 14 June 2022]