In your reflection, discuss the extent to which the British were aware of the addictive properties of opium during the time of the First Opium War with China. In your reflection, focus on 2-3 specific examples of British attitudes toward opium (as seen in statements by politicians, newspapers, merchants, and/or others cited in the reading).
The Historical Journal, , (), pp. – © Cambridge University Press
doi:./SX
NOTIONS OF ADDICTION IN THE TIME
OF THE FIRST OPIUM WAR*
P. E. C A Q U E T
Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge
ABSTRACT.
This article explores whether the British decision-makers and public were conscious of
the habit-forming nature of opium at the time of the Chinese war of –, the First Opium War.
While most political historians have assumed that the British authorities understood the nature of the
drug, social historians argue that notions of addiction only arose, in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the abundant press, pamphlet, and parliamentary literature generated by
the war debate, this article examines in what terms opium use was characterized. It considers the
groups that intervened on both sides of the debate and draws lessons from the arguments they deployed
for and against the war. Situating the source literature within the context of early Victorian values
and mores, finally, it argues that the British leaders and political nation were aware of the drug’s
habit-forming properties. Not only was it widely recognized that it was something dangerous that
was being introduced, at the point of a gun, into China, but there can be said to have existed, in
Britain, a layman’s notion of drug addiction.
The term ‘Opium War’ was popularized by opposition newspapers such as the
Tory Morning Herald and the Chartist Northern Star, and it was meant in an unambiguously pejorative sense, a war begun by ‘opium smugglers’ and ‘pestiferous smuggling rascals’. Hotly contested in the parliamentary debate that soon
followed, it became a tool for denouncing the hypocrisy and the callousness
of Britain’s intended attack on China. That it has become the established
label for the Anglo-Chinese war of – is proof, indeed, both of the vitality
of the original controversy around the war and the endurance of the case made
by its opponents.
In , British naval forces opened informal hostilities on Chinese military
units in what would erupt in the following year into a full-scale conflict between
Britain and the Chinese empire, a conflict that lasted until the signature of the
Gonville & Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge, CB TA pc@cam.ac.uk
* I am grateful to Michael Ledger-Lomas for his suggestions, encouragement, and comments on drafts of this article. I presented this paper at Jilin University, Changchun, and at
Cambridge in , and I would like to thank the attendees and organizers for their
support and input.
P. E. CAQUET
Treaty of Nanjing in . British and Parsee merchants were selling increasing
quantities of opium at Canton and on the South China coast, or rather smuggling in this opium against Chinese law. The opium, originating in Britishruled India and the principalities, was produced or bought wholesale under
monopoly, a practice which earned the East India Company significant
revenue. The clash itself was triggered by the confiscation under threat of a
large inventory of opium by a high-level Chinese official, commissioner Lin
Zexu, at Canton. The war was the first step in the partial colonization of
China, leading to the establishment of Hong Kong, and it remains a landmark
in Chinese history, ushering in, in the national historiography, China’s modern
era. Alongside its importance in international history, however, the episode
raises fundamental questions as to the status of opium in Britain itself.
Political historians have typically assumed that the British authorities understood the nature of the drug they were peddling. In accounts such as Brian
Inglis’s The Opium War, Peter Ward Fay’s book of the same name, Jack
Beeching’s The Chinese Opium Wars, or Glenn Melancon’s Britain’s China policy
and the opium crisis, for example, opium is effectively treated as a drug in the
twentieth-century sense of the term. An exception is Julia Lovell, in the
more recent The Opium War, who writes that there was prevailing ambiguity as
to opium’s properties and effects. Social historians, meanwhile, argue that
notions of drug addiction only arose, in Britain or Europe, towards the end
of the nineteenth century. In this view and in what has become known as the
‘disease theory of addiction’, it was the medical body that coined the modern
concept of addiction, having begun to classify habitual drug use as an illness,
a biological phenomenon beyond the patient’s control. Under this theory,
the concept also paved the way for institutionalization, at first voluntary
under the Habitual Drunkards Act of but at last compulsory. In a creeping
process and in the context of rising societal pressures for control, this would
have led to penalization in the early twentieth century. Before that, opium
use was ‘regarded at worst as a minor vice’, and the opium user had a ‘romantically intriguing and picaresque persona’, to quote the words of Geoffrey
£– million a year net, according to Warren more than one tenth of total Company
revenue in India: Brian Inglis, The Opium War (London, ), p. ; Samuel Warren, The
opium question (London, ), pp. –. This does not include what the merchants themselves
were making, nor the duties collected on Chinese tea imports.
Inglis, The Opium War; Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, – (Chapel Hill, NC,
); Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (London, ); and Glenn Melancon,
Britain’s China policy and the opium crisis (Aldershot, ). Fay touches on contemporary contexts on pp. –.
Julia Lovell, The Opium War (London, ), pp. –. Lovell seems to take her cue from
the social historians, especially Berridge.
The Habitual Drunkards Act and successor Inebriates Act targeted alcoholism but also
covered drugs taken in liquid form, and their scope was extended in the ensuing decades.
Penalization was a multi-step process, but a landmark was the Defence of the Realm
Act B.
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
Harding in Opiate addiction, morality, and medicine and Louise Foxcroft in The
making of addiction. As Virginia Berridge moreover notes in her magisterial
chronological survey, Opium and the people, the drug was legal, in the British
Isles, at the time of the Opium War. Aspirin having yet to be invented, it was
the only painkiller available. Eaten in pill form or mixed with wine to make laudanum, not smoked as in China, it was sold widely and retailed not just by doctors
and pharmacists but in grocery stores, and its distribution was neither regulated
nor subject to supervision.
Addiction itself remains a slippery term, a culturally bounded concept mixing
social and biological factors. As Berridge writes, nevertheless: ‘Addiction to
opiates may best be pictured as both a psychological and biological condition,
characterized by a desire to continue taking the drug in high dosage, a salience
of this drug-seeking drive over other life considerations, and a tendency to
relapse.’ To continue to paraphrase, habit is born both of the intensely pleasurable experience of opiate consumption and the repeated experience of the
pain of withdrawal. Beyond strictly medical definitions, addiction thus is and
was susceptible to a layman’s understanding in its basic characteristics.
This article explores whether and how far the British decision-makers and
public were conscious of the habit-forming nature of opium at the time of
the Chinese war. The disconnect between political and social narratives is
partly a question of focus: political historians have concentrated on events,
and social historians on the longer time frame, with emphasis on medical
sources. The First Opium War generated an abundant literature that has typically fallen outside the purview of historians of addiction: press, pamphlet, and
parliamentary materials, in particular, and archival correspondence and
memoirs. In the few years that the war lasted – or rather from to ,
when a final motion to end the trade failed in parliament – opium was
written about far more than had been customary, and by a larger slice than
usual of the writing public. This article begins by examining how and in what
terms opium use was described, and whether this betrayed an understanding
of its habit-forming properties. Much of the Opium War literature was meanwhile tangled up with domestic politics and therefore slanted. While this asks
for careful treatment, it also enables a useful parsing for allegiance, especially
since the cabinet majority changed in the middle of the war. This article thus
considers, next, the people who made the case for and against the war,
Geoffrey Harding, Opiate addiction, morality, and medicine (Basingstoke, ), p. ; Louise
Foxcroft, The making of addiction (Aldershot, ), p. . See also Mike Jay, Emperors of dream:
drugs in the nineteenth century (Sawtry, ), pp. –; and Howard Padwa, Social poison
(Baltimore, MD, ), pp. –.
Virginia Berridge, Opium and the people (rd edn, London, ), pp. xxix and –.
In a third historiographical strand, literary criticism, addiction had been a known quantity
since the seventeenth century: Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic imagination (London,
), pp. –.
Berridge, Opium and the people, p. .
P. E. CAQUET
seeking to draw lessons both from the arguments deployed and the composition
of the groups who made them. Finally, it situates the source literature within the
context of early Victorian values and mores. Wider ideas on morality, temperance, and regulation were bound to condition British notions on opium, and
these notions both drew from and offered clues as to broader contemporary
attitudes to substance abuse.
I
The words ‘addicted’ and ‘addiction’ themselves were occasionally used, it is
worth noting, in the contemporary literature on opium. The pamphleteer
A. S. Thelwall, the missionary and geographer Charles Gutzlaff, and the chronicler Lewis Shuck, for example, all used the term ‘addicted’, and so did the
Canton-based Chinese Repository, edited by the Protestant mission, multiple
times. A geography by George Tradescant Lay spoke of ‘addiction’, and
the Foreign Quarterly Review wrote that ‘the use of opium is so much more dangerous, because a person who is once addicted to it can never leave it off’. The
word, in use at least since the sixteenth century, nevertheless seems to have
had a more general meaning than it has now, akin to the position of being dedicated or devoted to a thing or an activity, even if some echo perhaps remained of
the word’s Latin root, addictio, a legal term describing a debtor’s remittance into
the custody of his creditor and implying a loss of control.
The numerous terms used to describe opium, however, on both sides of the
fence in the Opium War debate, are instructive. Even the numerically few apologists of the opium traffic tended to use mildly negative locutions to describe the
drug. At best it was called a luxury, often a ‘vicious luxury’. Partisans sometimes
argued opium-smoking was no worse than regular gin-drinking, using the comparison to make the opium traffic acceptable, if not necessarily respectable, in
the Chinese context. Yet the salient feature of the war debate is that the language associated with opium was overwhelmingly derogatory.
Opium was possibly most often called a ‘poison’, a negative term that did not
necessarily imply addictive properties, only that it was bad for health, whether
due to the risks of overdose or its effects on longevity. The risks of overdose,
indeed, as social historians have pointed out, were becoming a serious
concern at the time, and a long-running s debate on poisons would eventually help usher in the Pharmacy Act of , under which opium became
A. S. Thelwall, The iniquities of the opium trade with China (London, ), pp. –; Charles
Gutzlaff, China opened ( vols., London, ), I, pp. –; Jehu Lewis Shuck, Portfolio Chinensis
(Macao, ), p. ; and Chinese Repository (Jan. ), pp. –.
George Tradescant Lay, The Chinese as they are (London, ), p. ; ‘On the preparation of opium for the Chinese market’, Foreign Quarterly Review (Oct. ), pp. –.
www.oed.com/view/Entry/?redirectedFrom=addiction#eid (accessed Aug.
).
This article addresses the comparison and its implications for addiction further down.
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
labelled a poison and its sale restricted to the professional sphere. Yet pamphlet, press, and other writers also made use of a more revealing vocabulary.
Typical and widely used labels were the terms of ‘a pernicious drug’, ‘infatuating’, ‘demoralising’, ‘enervating’, and the cause of ‘mania’. All these terms –
with their evocations of insidiousness, seduction, folly, and loss of moral
compass – implied that opium’s effects were in some respect underhand, and
that in a greater or lesser degree the drug had the power to subvert or circumvent the user’s will.
The Opium War literature also quoted numerous original Chinese documents in translation, such as imperial memoranda, as did a parliamentary
Blue Book containing a selection of Foreign Office correspondence that was
itself further excerpted in the press. It is worth noting that while these documents invariably referred to opium as ‘vile’, ‘evil’, ‘filth’, etc., this Chinese terminology was never or almost never challenged, even by partisans of the war. As
wrote a Chinese memorial quoted in a book by John Francis Davis, a one-time
British and Company representative at Canton:
Those who smoke opium, and eventually become its victims, have a periodical
longing for it, which can only be assuaged by the application of the drug at the
regular time…Thus opium becomes, to opium-smokers, their very life; and, when
they are seized and brought before magistrates, they will sooner suffer a severe chastisement than inform against those who sell it.
(Lovell, who consulted these sources in the original, sometimes implies that the
Chinese only had a vague understanding of the drug’s properties. Dikötter,
Laamann, and Xun go further and challenge the very view that opiumsmoking had any widespread, damaging incidence at the time. The sinologist
David Anthony Bello writes that, on the contrary, ‘Qing opium prohibition
was a response to the uncontrollable power of opium as an addictive consumable’, and that Mandarin administrators had developed a vocabulary for
‘craving’ or ‘addiction’ (yin) and for describing the perils of withdrawal. It is
Among opponents of the traffic, references to poison are innumerable. Pro-war writers
who labelled opium a poison included John Elliot Bingham, Narrative of the expedition to
China ( vols., London, ), I, pp. –; and Robert Viscount Jocelyn, Six months with the
Chinese expedition (London, ), pp. –. On concerns about opium poisoning and the
Pharmacy Act, see Foxcroft, The making of addiction, pp. –; and Berridge, Opium and the
people, pp. – and –.
As a sample of such uses: ‘The Canton Register’, British and Foreign Review (Apr. ),
p. ; Walter Henry Medhurst, China, its state and prospects (London, ), p. ; ‘The iniquities of the opium trade with China’, Eclectic Review (Oct. ), pp. –; Horatio Montagu, A
voice for China (London, ), p. ; and C. A. Bruce, Report on the tea plantations of Assam
(Calcutta, ), p. .
Correspondence relating to China (London, ); Times, Sept. , p. ; ‘China’,
Saturday Magazine ( Apr. ), pp. –; and House of Commons, Hansard’s parliamentary
debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. , c. .
From a memorial to the emperor quoted in John Francis Davis, The Chinese ( vols.,
London, ), II, p. .
P. E. CAQUET
also worth noting, in this context, the early opium prohibitions by various Far
Eastern countries ranging from fourteenth-century Thailand to Edo-period
Japan noted by James Windle and suggesting there remains room for much
valuable scholarship in the area.)
Perhaps the qualifier ‘vicious’ was meanwhile elucidated as follows:
Again it must be admitted without reserve that what is called opium-smoking in moderation is rank nonsense. The slaves to this habit must wind up the system at particular
times, or be wretched; they must increase the dose from ‘moderation’ (!) to excess in
order to continue its power over them, and which, like all vicious indulgences, it
requires daily an addition in quantity to maintain.
As this example hints, moreover, the opium traffic was repeatedly compared to
the slave trade. This had, of course, a rhetorical element to it, aiming to rouse
the British public, with its considerable philanthropic clout, against opium as it
had been roused against the slave trade and slavery itself. Yet the implication,
from the language of such comparisons, was also that opium enslaved the
user, rendering him or her powerless to escape its clutch. For the editors of
the Morning Herald, the opium trade was ‘this demoralising traffic – a traffic
as pernicious in its nature, and destructive of the human race, as the slave
trade itself’. As a Times reader saw it: ‘It cannot be questioned, but that the
peaceful industrious Chinese suffers greater degradation and wretchedness in
passing from his condition of life to that of a paralytic idiot, than the African
in passing from his native horde under the dominion of a West India
planter.’ Lord Ashley, the social activist, proclaimed in a parliamentary
motion to end the opium trade in April :
That terrible system of slavery does not necessarily destroy the physical and moral
qualities of its victims. It tortures and degrades the man, but it leaves him susceptible
of regeneration. But the opium trade destroys the man, both body and soul, and
carries a hideous ruin over millions which can never be repaired.
Such parallels with the slave trade are indeed all the more troubling for their
potential implications for free will and moral choice. The prevailing historical
model on drug dependence remains that moral blame prevented notions of
Lovell, in her chapter on the subject, tends to treat Chinese and British notions as synonymous. Lovell, The Opium War, pp. – and –; Frank Dikötter, Lasrs Laamann, and
Zhou Xun, Narcotic culture: a history of drugs in China (London, ), pp. – and –;
David Anthony Bello, Opium and the limits of empire (Cambridge, MA, ), pp. –. I am
indebted to David Luesink for this reference. See also James Windle, ‘How the East influenced
drug prohibition’, International History Review, (), pp. –.
‘Abuse of opium’, Chinese Repository (Feb. ), p. .
The many such parallels include for example William Groser, What can be done to suppress
the opium trade (London, ), p. ; and Leeds Mercury, Nov. , p. .
Morning Herald, Nov. , p. .
Times, Dec. , p. .
Commons Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. ,
c. .
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
addiction from emerging until the ‘rise of science’. And according to this
model, moral blame in turn rested on belief in free will: the conceptualization
of drug dependence as disease, either involving a suspension of the human will
or undermining belief in free will itself, was what would have helped addiction
arise as a modern concept. The term ‘inebriety’ thus formalized in medical
language, in the s, the idea that the habitual drug user had durably surrendered his or her self-control. Yet slavery was classically seen to preclude or
impair the capacity for moral choice. Indeed, this had been a major reason
for evangelical campaigning against it. If, therefore, habitual opium use was
akin to slavery, it involved a suspension of, or a threat to, the user’s free will.
‘It plucks the beautiful consciousness of moral responsibility out of the soul’,
wrote the Illustrated London News of opium in its reporting on the Ashley
motion. The ‘moral’ implications of the slavery parallel are that opium use
led to dependence.
Incidentally, historians of addiction have also taken De Quincey’s Confessions
of an English opium-eater as the model for a Romantic, early nineteenth-century
British view of the drug. Yet Opium War commentators seem to have been
aware that this was a poetical text and, on either side in the debate, the
Confessions tended to be taken as unreliable and/or as darker and less forgiving
than historians have allowed. De Quincey himself, who had already flaunted
his strong aversion to the Chinese civilization in the Confessions, published in
Blackwood’s Magazine what were perhaps the most rabid opinion pieces of the
war, calling the Chinese ‘bestial’, ‘savage’, and so on, and advocating their submission and colonization – and yet even these failed to defend opium. In a
strange twist, his second son later fell a rare casualty on the British expeditionary
force and died near Canton in .
A number of contemporary documents, finally, described the mechanisms of
opium addiction in detail, including the craving for larger doses and withdrawal
symptoms. Perhaps the most explicit was Thelwall’s, a pamphlet which, having
been published in timely fashion in , enjoyed wide publicity through part
See for example Foxcroft, The making of addiction, pp. –.
Ibid., pp. –; Berridge, Opium and the people, pp. –.
‘The opium plague’, Illustrated London News ( Apr. ), p. .
They also focus on the not the edition, whose introductory pages are far more
explicit: Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an opium-eater (nd edn, London, ), pp. –.
Warren, The opium question, pp. –; T. H. Bullock, The Chinese vindicated (London,
), pp. –; John Fisher Murray, The Chinese and the Ministry (London, ), p. ;
‘Canton Register, July to December ’, Foreign Quarterly Review (Apr. ), p. ;
Canton Press ( May ), p. ; and ‘Confessions of an opium-eater’, Chinese Repository
(Nov. ), pp. –.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English opium-eater (London, ), pp. –;
Thomas De Quincey, ‘The opium and the China question’, Blackwood’s Magazine (June
), pp. –; and ‘Canton expedition and convention’, Blackwood’s Magazine (Nov.
), pp. –.
Grevel Lindop, The opium-eater (London, ), p. .
P. E. CAQUET
serialization in the press and other channels. Dwelling on the opium-smoking
experience as well as citing the testimonies of travellers and doctors, this wrote:
The first indulgence prepares the way for the second; the second for a third; and so
on till it becomes habitual. There is something peculiarly ensnaring in the use of
opium; not only on account of the high excitement of the imagination which is
the immediate result of the stimulus, but more especially because that high excitement is soon followed by a correspondent lassitude and intolerable depression,
which scarcely anything but a repetition of the dose can relieve. Thus the habit
grows upon the wretched victim, till he becomes entirely enslaved to it; and so
strong is the necessity of having recourse to the stimulus at the regular hour, that
it has even been affirmed, that fatal consequences might result from sudden and
total abstinence.
Opium use thus involved a need for repeated doses and withdrawal pains. One
also notes the word ‘victim’, another term implying that the user was somehow
rendered helpless by the drug. In the words of the travel narrative of the missionary Walter Medhurst:
When the habit is once formed it grows till it becomes inveterate; discontinuance is
more and more difficult, until at length the sudden deprivation of the accustomed
indulgence produces death. In proportion as the wretched victim comes under the
power of the infatuating drug, so is his ability to resist temptation less strong.
For the anonymous author of China as it was and as it is, otherwise a supporter of
the war: ‘The pain they suffer when deprived of the drug, after long habit, no
language can explain; and it is only when to a certain degree under its
influence that their faculties are alive.’
The need for increasing dosage was likewise duly observed. According to the
Foreign Quarterly Review: ‘Any one who is once enslaved by it, cannot, it is true,
give it up without great difficulty…In this state they eagerly return to the cause
of their suffering, and strive to drown the extent of their pain by increasing
their daily quantum of the fatal drug.’ The Chinese Repository published multiple
descriptions of the addiction process, one of which detailed the stages of the
opium habit in formation, complete with the first casual use, repetition and increase, and the pain of attempted renunciation. And in the Quarterly Review’s
pithy formulation: ‘The increase of appetite grows by what it feeds on.’
Whether or not they used the term itself, the pamphlets and press that arose
around the war thus accounted for the principal features of the addiction
process. The opium user was compelled to take the drug regularly, often in increasing dosage. Withdrawal had debilitating effects. Opium was a poison and it
Thelwall, The iniquities of the opium trade, pp. –.
Medhurst, China, its state and prospects, p. .
China as it was and as it is (London, ), p. .
‘On the preparation of opium’, Foreign Quarterly Review, pp. and .
‘Opium and alcohol’, Chinese Repository (July ), pp. –.
‘Iniquities of the opium trade with China’, Quarterly Review (Mar. ), p. .
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
was pernicious, the traffic in it worthy of being compared to the slave trade.
Both the vocabulary employed in the – literature and its descriptions
of opium use implied an awareness of many or all of the basic aspects of drug
dependence as it would later come medically to be conceptualized.
II
That the opium traffic was a less than glamorous cause, however, is best illustrated by the nature of the arguments deployed by the war’s own advocates.
Though the drug had long been an illegal article in China, the Daoguang
emperor had initiated a fresh campaign against opium and the opium trade
in . In addition to a raft of punitive domestic regulations, this had involved
the appointment of the forceful commissioner Lin. Finding moral suasion ineffective, Lin had confiscated, in March , a large quantity of opium held in
and around Canton by the British merchant community: , chests, for a
value of around £ million. This had involved the blockading of the British merchants’ enclave within the Chinese town, and the merchants had been joined in
their ‘factories’ by Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of the Trade of
British Subjects in China and the acting British representative. Though Lin’s
blockade had been non-violent, his actions were soon characterized as the grossest abuse and an insult to the British flag.
The most flagrant feature of the war case was indeed how studiously it
avoided resorting to a defence of the opium traffic. Central to the case for
the Chinese war was denying that it was about opium. The tussle over the
name ‘opium war’ was itself emblematic. The pro-war, ministerial newspapers
the Morning Chronicle and the Globe both fought against the label, and so
did the free-trade, radical Manchester Guardian. ‘Who after this can deny
that the war with China is an OPIUM WAR?’, asked the Eclectic Review in
reply, one of the numerous periodicals to find the name quite apposite.
Denials could meanwhile go so far as to involve choice repudiations of opium
itself. In the words of the Morning Chronicle, a Whig publication, perhaps the
most staunchly pro-cabinet newspaper, and virtually Palmerston’s mouthpiece:
Fearful would be the responsibility of the Government, and deep-dyed the guilt with
which they would have sullied and degraded our national character, had they permitted the battle flag of England to be unfurled in favour of a trade which bears,
wrapped up in every case and bale it carries to the shores of China, delirium and
death, and a moral plague more baneful than ever borne to a doomed people by
‘the pestilence which walketh in darkness’. The Chinese war has no such aims.
Morning Chronicle, Mar. , p. , Apr. , p. , and June , p. ; Globe,
Apr. , p. ; and Manchester Guardian, Mar. , p. .
‘Debate in the House of Commons on Sir James Graham’s Motion, April ’, Eclectic
Review (June ), p. .
Morning Chronicle, Mar. , p. .
P. E. CAQUET
Rather, the war was intended to seek redress from
a power which cut off our whole trade, expelled our subjects from its shores, endeavoured to cut off the supplies of food and water, and ordered out a fleet of war junks
to attack them, because they refused…to give up a man to be butchered before their
eyes, in order to satisfy the requisitions of a barbarian revenge.
Blackwood’s Magazine insisted on Chinese ‘outrages’ as the conflict’s true
origin. ‘The English government cannot permit its officers and its subjects
to be outraged in China’, explained the Manchester Guardian. For the
editors of the Examiner, the fight was about the ‘indignity’ that China had
forced on the British even while they confessed that: ‘We think opium
smoking a baneful habit, as bad as gin drinking, or perhaps rather worse.’
The looming Chinese war was the object of a House of Commons debate on
– April , on the basis of a motion submitted by the Tory James Graham
which actually came close to bringing down the cabinet at division. Though
the motion’s wording indicted the cabinet for its diplomatic failings, the
debate came to revolve around the war and, inevitably, opium. Palmerston,
as foreign secretary, was thus called upon to defend his and Britain’s
position. ‘He would be the last to defend a trade which involved the violation
of the municipal laws of the Chinese, and which furnished an enormously
large population with the means of demoralization’, he pleaded. To an
earlier inquiry, Palmerston had meanwhile explained that the purpose of the
war would be:
In the first place…to obtain reparation for the insults and injuries offered to her
Majesty’s Superintendent, and her Majesty’s subjects, by the Chinese government;
and in the second place … to obtain for the merchants trading with China an indemnification for the loss of their property, incurred by threats of violence offered by
persons under the direction of the Chinese government.
Thomas Macaulay, who as secretary at war was first in line to answer Graham,
likewise condemned China for having ‘resorted to measures unjust and unlawful, confined our innocent countrymen, and insulted the Sovereign in the
person of her representative’. He regretted deeply the existence of the
opium trade, but as to the notion that the government was attempting to
force an ‘opium war’ on the public, ‘he thought that it was impossible to be conceived that a thought so absurd and so atrocious should have ever entered the
Ibid., Apr. , p. .
‘War with China, and the opium question’, Blackwood’s Magazine (Mar. ), pp. –.
Manchester Guardian, Mar. , p. .
‘The quarrel with China’, Examiner ( Mar. ), p. .
The House divided to in the cabinet’s favour.
Commons Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. ,
c. .
Quoted in ‘The quarrel with China’, Examiner, p. .
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
minds of the British Ministry’. George Staunton, who was an important voice
because he had gone on two China embassies, was a translator of works to and
from Chinese, and had spent twenty years at the East India Company factory in
Canton, declined to support the Graham motion but without omitting to
mention the opium trade’s ‘immorality’ and calling the drug a ‘pernicious
article’. John Cam Hobhouse, as president of the Board of Control, openly
washed his hands of the trade, pointing out that, as earlier debates and
reports relating to the East India Company attested, the whole body of parliamentarians had long been acquainted with opium’s ‘demoralising effects’.
In order to justify the opium traffic, indeed, rather than deny it was baneful,
partisans of the war shifted the blame onto the Chinese in a tactic that deployed
three key arguments. First, the Chinese were alleged to have connived at the
trade through bribery and corruption, so that it should not be considered to
have been genuinely illegal. Second, the emperor’s true concern in banning
opium was said to have been the export of silver and the negative metallic
balance involved in the trade, not his subjects’ health. Third, it was advanced
that alternative suppliers would emerge anyway should Britain abandon the
trade, so that it would be quixotic to do so. Palmerston thus hammered home
that ‘this was an exportation of [Chinese] bullion question, an agricultural
interest-protection question’. The argument of Mandarin connivance and
the claim that the preservation of ‘sycee’ silver (Chinese silver bars) really
drove opium bans were both brandished in pro-war press articles and pamphlets. No doubt there was a partial validity to all three claims: some low-level
Mandarins did wink at opium imports, the drainage of silver was, as imperial
memoranda attested, a concern in Beijing alongside public health, and the
Company had earlier tried and failed to contain the growth of ‘Malwa’, the
opium grown in the principalities and thus outside British-held Bengal. Yet
the point was that the opium traffic was never defended on its own terms, but
only through a circuitous argumentation and a combination of excuses.
Palmerston was meanwhile not the only responsible official seeking to distance himself from the trade and prove that he had ‘endeavoured to discountenance the traffic to the utmost of his power’. Charles Elliot, or perhaps
his friends, published a second extract from the correspondence, alongside
the Blue Book, with the aim of exonerating the superintendent of trade of responsibility for the Chinese conflict. This quoted Elliot’s missives to his chief
on ‘a trade, which every friend to humanity must deplore’ and whose importance
Commons Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. , cc.
–.
Ibid., cc. –.
Ibid., Apr. , cc. –.
Ibid., c. .
For example Warren, The opium question, pp. –; Globe, Mar. , p. ; Morning
Chronicle, Mar. , p. .
Commons Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. , c. .
P. E. CAQUET
to the British trade with China was ‘of itself, a source of painful reflection’. The
book’s editor went so far as to describe Elliot as ‘one who was devoting all his heart,
and soul, and strength to the suppression of it [the opium trade]’. It is worth
noting, lastly, that the Treaty of Nanjing did not legalize or even mention
opium, and that legalization was not a British demand. When asked by a
Chinese representative why Britain refused to ban the trade, Henry Pottinger,
the British plenipotentiary, replied that it was unable to do so while in the same
breath he was prepared to describe the drug as an ‘evil’ and a ‘cancer’.
Yet a more accurate description of the Opium War debate is perhaps that it
involved three rather than just two camps. Among the war advocates were on the
one hand polemicists seeking to absolve the government of responsibility for
the trade itself, and on the other a team of people seeking, on the contrary,
to implicate it in order to secure the merchants compensation for their lost
£ million. Unsurprisingly, this second group was the more inclined to
defend opium itself, and the drug’s most benign, or rather less offensive characterizations, including parallels with spirits and gin, tended to come from that
corner. In May , a group of merchants led by the Jardine–Matheson partnership had despatched a deputation to London to argue its case, with £,
or ‘any amount of expense’ at its disposal to pay for lawyers and ‘literary men’ to
perform the job. The opium trade was discussed several times in parliament
aside from the Graham motion, whether on the compensation issue or as the
result of moves by anti-opium activists, notably Earl Stanhope in the Lords on
May and Lord Ashley in the Commons on April . This was
also the occasion for a defence of the opium trade by the merchants, some of
whom were MPs, or by their lobby. Among the ‘governmental’ group were,
apart from Staunton, Macaulay, and Palmerston, the pamphleteer Syndey
Bell, a number of newspapers, and Lord Wellington who, though a Tory,
killed the Stanhope motion on patriotic grounds while denying that opium
was the cause of the war. Among those prepared to speak more mildly of
opium itself, the second group, were Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, Samuel
Warren, the anonymous author of The rupture with China and its causes, Leitch
Ritchie, Roundell Palmer, and the MP James Hogg. Lindsay was an ex-chairman of the Canton Chamber of Commerce and a partner at an opium-trading
Elliot to Palmerston, Apr. and Feb. , quoted in A digest of the despatches on
China (London, ), pp. and .
Ibid., p. .
Quoted in Granville Loch, Closing events of the campaign in China (London, ), p. .
James Matheson to William Jardine, May , quoted in Alain Le Pichon, China trade
and empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the origins of British rule in Hong Kong, –
(Oxford, ), p. .
Sydney S. Bell, Answer to Samuel Warren’s ‘The opium question’ (London, ); Lords
Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , May , cc. –.
An exception to the group was Alexander Graham, who argued for compensation but also
repudiated the opium trade: Alexander Graham, The right, obligation, & interest of the government
of Great Britain to require redress from the government of China (Glasgow, ).
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
firm. He had been calling for a war against China since . Warren was
one of the merchants’ hired penmen. The author of The rupture with China
may well have been Jardine himself. Ritchie was editor of the Indian News and possibly not disinterested. Palmer was a young jurist and probably another hired hand.
Hogg was a director of the East India Company who had made his fortune in
India. The magazine John Bull duly mocked Hogg with a poem entitled ‘The
praise of the poppy’ (‘A new song, to be sung by Mr Hogg, M. P., at the annual
banquet given by the directors of the East India Company’):
To suit ev’ry taste,
We’ve extracted a paste,
More sweetly seductive than wine,
Whose magical pow’r,
Shall charm ev’ry hour
…Thus, if thanks to our arms,
And to Morphia’s charms,
The Emp’ror we can but cajole,
What a glorious plan,
For the ruin of man,
In China, – mind, body, and soul!!!
The opium traffic was indefensible on its own terms. Almost no one outside
the merchants seeking compensation for their lost £ million and their hired
penmen was prepared to speak up for it. As to the merchants’ private views
on opium, finally, Matheson’s biographer believes that he was sincere in
deeming it harmless. Some merchants were prepared to condemn the
drug, however, notably C. W. King, from the firm Olyphant & Co., who also
denounced his fellow traders’ hypocrisy. Medhurst, who had spent many
years in China, opined likewise. And the merchant-funded Canton Press, a
rival to the Canton Register, decried opium and the opium trade on several occasions even while it took the merchants’ side in their fight with the Chinese.
Lindsay’s pamphlet was H. Hamilton Lindsay, Is the war with China a just one? (London,
). Lindsay also spoke against the Ashley motion in the Commons, Hansard’s parliamentary
debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. , cc. –.
H. Hamilton Lindsay, Letter to the right honourable Viscount Palmerston on British relations with
China (London, ).
As the editors of the Chinese Repository confirmed: ‘Pamphlets on China’, Chinese Repository
(July ), p. ; and as noted in Inglis, The Opium War, p. .
As suggested by its opening pages: The rupture with China and its causes (London, ),
pp. –.
Hogg quoted Jardine in arguing against the Ashley motion: Commons Debate, Hansard’s
parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. , cc. –.
John Bull ( Apr. ), p. .
Le Pichon, China trade and empire, pp. –.
C .W. King, Opium crisis: a letter addressed to Charles Elliot (London, ), p. .
Medhurst, China, its state and prospects, p. .
Canton Press ( Jan. ), pp. –, ( July ), p. , and ( Nov. ), pp. –.
P. E. CAQUET
III
‘China, we think, is essentially right, and this country is essentially wrong.’
Historical works on addiction sometimes give the impression that anti-opium
agitation was confined to a Quaker-dominated, puritanical fringe, and of
having been narrow almost to the point of inexistence in –. Though
the anti-opium agitation had a strong Christian component, it was actually
broad-based, including many lay activists, and even in its religious dimension
it swept well beyond nonconformity to encompass a broad, even a majority,
Church of England section.
A large share of the press, notably, stood up against the Opium War and militated against the traffic, including some periodicals usually friendly to the
cabinet. Sustained campaigns against the opium trade included those run by
the highbrow Eclectic Review, by the free-trade and Liberal Leeds Mercury, and
by The Times, Britain’s most widely read and influential newspaper. The
Eclectic Review devoted several articles to the trade, beginning in October
and ending in June , calling it ‘that disgraceful traffic’, describing
the opium user as ‘reduced by the fumes of opium almost to idiotism’, taking
commissioner Lin’s side against the merchants, and generally demanding
that the opium traffic be suppressed. The Times’s campaign was even more persistent, beginning as early as August , when the first news of the Canton
events arrived, running into tens of articles, letters, and editorials, and continuing beyond the peace treaty. The editors quoted Thelwall’s book at length and,
in the name of both ‘honour’ and ‘humanity’, called for parliament to ‘put
down this abominable traffic’ and free China from ‘this poisonous pest’.
They indicted the Company, writing that opium promised ‘death to their infatuated customers’. On the Commons debate, they wrote:
We can tell Lord Palmerston that an utter detestation of the protection afforded by
him to the opium traffic, notwithstanding his system of make-believe discouragement, prevails throughout this country, and animates the honest hearts of the
people, and that before many weeks have passed he will find himself among the
victims of the opium war.
Campaigning continued into , well after the war had started, comparing
the opium traffic to the slave trade, poking fun at official arguments, and criticizing the war in a long editorial as late as November. On the signature of the
Record, July , p. .
Harding, Opiate addiction, morality, and medicine, pp. –.
‘Iniquities’, Eclectic Review (Oct. ), pp. –; ‘Debate in the House of Commons’,
Eclectic Review (June ), pp. –; and ‘Sketches of China’, Eclectic Review (June
), pp. –.
Times, Aug. , p. .
Ibid., Oct. , p. .
Ibid., Apr. , p. .
Ibid., June , p. , Aug. , p. , and Nov. , p. .
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
Treaty of Nanjing, the editors asked that ‘We should cease to be mixed up with
it, to foster it [the opium trade], or to make it a source of Indian revenue … We
should not only disavow, but distinctly discourage and set our faces against it …
in short, that it should be put down.’ Significantly, The Times, a Tory newspaper,
was also prepared to make sarcastic observations on Wellington’s betrayal of the
Stanhope anti-opium motion of May , and it complained in that the
cabinet, now headed by Robert Peel, was churlish in having rejected the Ashley
motion. The Leeds Mercury, conversely a long-time Whig supporter, stood consistently against both the opium trade and the war. Having begun to attack the
opium trade in pieces that quoted the King pamphlet, among others, it published several virulent anti-war editorials in and continued calling
opium ‘this poisonous drug for the infatuated multitudes’ into . Other
major newspapers that denounced the opium traffic included the Standard,
the Morning Herald – which though Tory likened Peel to ‘the keeper of a
bagnio’ – and Britain’s foremost evangelical newspaper, the Record.
The opium traffic was also criticized because it involved smuggling, because it
was accused of crowding out legitimate manufactured goods exports to China,
and because it hindered the preaching of Christianity by missionaries. These
were always distinct arguments, however, and opium was more often attacked
for what it was. The case against opium rested in equal, indeed in predominant,
proportion, on the opprobrium it attracted as a drug. Nor was agitation, importantly, limited to a narrow coterie of devout moralists, even less of nonconformist
moralists. Among major anti-opium pamphleteers, William Groser was a Baptist,
but both Thelwall and Horatio Montagu were Church of England clergymen,
and graduates of Cambridge University. The Chinese Repository, which consistently opposed the opium traffic, was edited by the Protestant mission in China
which, sponsored by the London, Foreign Bible, and Church Missionary
Societies, ecumenically grouped Church of England and nonconformist
members. Key lay pamphleteers moreover included the merchants King
and William Storrs Fry, the Irish essayist John Fisher Murray, T. H. Bullock, a
captain in the Nizam’s army, and the Company superintendant C. A. Bruce.
When, in February , an Anti-Opium Society was formed, its founding committee included no more than two churchmen out of thirty members.
Admittedly, both parliamentarians who volunteered motions on the opium
Ibid., Dec. , p. .
Ibid., May , p. , and Apr. , p. .
Leeds Mercury, Nov. , p. , Nov. , p. , Jan. , p. , Nov. , p. ,
and Mar. , p. .
E.g. Standard, May , p. ; Morning Herald, Apr. , p. , and Apr. , p. ;
and Record, Apr. , p. .
Both Fay and Lovell tend to exaggerate the mission’s support of the opium merchants,
especially based on the atypical Gutzlaff: Peter Ward Fay, ‘The Protestant mission and the
Opium War’, Pacific Historical Review, (), pp. –; Lovell, The Opium War, pp. –.
Record, Mar. , p. .
P. E. CAQUET
trade, Stanhope and Ashley, were deeply religious figures. (Notably, William
Gladstone also spoke up resolutely against the traffic: his sister Helen, to
whom he was quite close, was a lifelong laudanum addict.) Yet the narrow
cabinet majority on the Graham motion attested to widespread reluctance to
condone the traffic. Other renowned petitioners and public speakers against
opium meanwhile included the Quaker abolitionist Joseph Sturge, but also
the Anglican anti-slavery activist Thomas Clarkson and the radicals Lord
Brougham and Daniel O’Connell, who said of the drug that it was ‘destroying
the intellects of the natives, murdering their bodies, and ruining their souls
for ever’.
Couching argumentation in Christian language was only common of contemporary humanitarian causes, especially foreign causes which, like anti-slavery,
had the potential for harnessing the domestically powerful missionary movement. Lay criticism, the composition of the anti-opium campaign shows, was
just as and indeed rather more voluminous than clerical criticism of opium.
Opposition to the traffic was not merely rooted in, and was far too strongly
worded to have solely resided in, objections to vice. The press organs that
lined up against it were furthermore bold and persistent in their denunciations.
They were even prepared to thwart traditional political allegiances in their campaigning against it. The broad base of anti-opium activism, as well as betraying
in its language an appreciation of the dangers of opium use, showed what widespread misgivings the drug invoked.
IV
The nature of the war case and the breadth of the opposing campaign confirm
that, among the informed public, opium was overwhelmingly viewed as a destructive drug, a product whose ownership it was best to deny. The terms invariably used, furthermore, and the evidence deployed, evinced an awareness of
opium’s habit-forming properties. There was, admittedly, an informative
aspect to the Opium War literature, though much of it was sufficiently elliptical
to imply prior knowledge, and one reason for the detailed accounts found in the
various pamphlets was that the practice of Chinese opium-smoking differed
from opium-eating, inviting graphic depictions of the process. Perhaps opium
nevertheless carried, especially in literary tradition, specific Oriental connotations, inviting at home a certain detachment from Chinese affairs. Distance
and familiarization, and the tension between the two, are inherent to crosscultural observation and the discourses it generates. At the time of the
S. G. Checkland, The Gladstones: a family biography, – (Cambridge, ),
pp. –.
Leeds Mercury, Mar, , p. ; Morning Herald, May , p. ; and Times, July
, p. . The ‘natives’ in this last quote were Indian.
See Barry Milligan, Pleasures and pains: opium and the Orient in nineteenth-century British
culture (Charlottesville, VA, ).
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
Opium War, the London opium dens had yet to open and the social concerns
they would spark yet to arise. Yet the twin mechanisms of contrast and association were already at work in the Opium War debate, in particular through
hypothetical arguments around bans and imaginary smuggling on the English
coast and through parallels with alcohol consumption at home. Opium’s
British standing at the time of the Chinese war must also be considered in
the light of broader contemporary notions on substance abuse.
The best that was said, indeed, of opium-smoking was that it was no worse
than heavy drinking. Alcoholism only emerged as a term in the s, and historians of addiction write that the concept flowed from its own ‘disease theory’,
albeit in a somewhat earlier timeframe beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, or even earlier, and therefore matching the – period
better. Alcohol and opium are habit-forming in different degrees, moreover,
the processes mixing social and biological factors in different proportions. As it
has been suggested, perhaps the comparison evinced a lack of awareness of the
drug’s habit-forming power.
Yet first, as discussed, such equations tended to be a rhetorical tool of the
merchant lobby. Second, parallels with drinking were scarcely intended to
evoke the convivial atmosphere of the local pub. The comparison was invariably with spirits, especially gin, and with dram-drinking. If China faced a
problem in the shape of its opium shops, so did Britain with its gin
palaces, the argument went. As a recent official enquiry into the matter
attested, prevalent drunkenness was considered a serious issue in Britain.
When pamphleteers and journalists confronted dram-drinking and opiumsmoking, this was typically not in their biological effects, but in their statistical
incidence. The point was less about similarity of experience, and more about
the percentage of the population affected. Opium was compared to spirits
as an instrument of social destruction, not as something useful or benign,
even by its partisans.
On the topic, see ibid., pp. –.
For similes involving smuggling, generally French, off the English coast, see for example
William Storrs Fry, Facts and evidence relating to the opium trade with China (London, ),
pp. –; Graham, The right, obligation & interest, pp. –; and Hobhouse in Commons
Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. , c. .
William F. Bynum, ‘Chronic alcoholism in the first half of the nineteenth century’, Bulletin
of the History of Medicine, (), pp. –; Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (nd
edn, Staffordshire, ), pp. –; Roy Porter, ‘The drinking man’s disease: the “prehistory” of alcoholism in Georgian Britain’, British Journal of Addiction, (), pp. –
. Berridge has a later timeframe: Berridge, Opium and the people, pp. –.
Report from the select committee on inquiry into drunkenness, with minutes of evidence, and appendix, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (London, ).
‘The opium and the China question’, Blackwood’s Magazine, p. ; Globe, Apr. ,
p. ; Warren, The opium question, pp. –; Some pros and cons of the opium question (London,
), pp. –.
P. E. CAQUET
Third, a great many were ready to point out that opium was more strongly
habit-forming than alcohol. Thelwall wrote of the ‘tenfold force’ of opium
slavery compared to ardent spirits. Elliot’s own editor opined that opium
was ‘more dangerous’ because it ‘enervates the will’. The Christian Observer
found that it ‘exceeds in its horrors the effect of dram-drinking’. The
popular Saturday Magazine observed that ‘It is different [from alcohol] with
the use of opium; a moderate dose soon loses its power, and with time the quantity used requires to be progressively augmented until the opium-eater becomes
a victim to the abuse of his drug.’
Fourth and last, though the rich relationship between contemporary notions
of drunkenness, temperance, and alcoholism medically defined was still undergoing, at the time, a process of differentiation, the opium–spirits parallel itself
arguably made the case for an understanding of the drug’s compulsive power.
Britain was home to a temperance and a teetotal movement, both having begun
to develop in earnest in the late s. The teetotal movement, loosely aligned
with Nonconformity, may perhaps be tied to a puritanical association of all stimulants with vice. Temperance, however, distinguished between drinking and
drunkenness, so that the enemy was not so much inebriation itself as its habitual
version. Admittedly, the Victorians did not systematically distinguish between
drunkenness as state and as regular practice, this last notion being marred by
‘moral overtones’. Yet as one historian notes, habitual drunkenness had
begun to be recognized as compulsive by the s, and a ‘drunkard’ meant
a person habitually drunk, as in: ‘There never yet was a thorough drunkard
who, in the interval of sobriety, was not almost ready to cut his throat; and
until he returned to the drink, as a dog to his vomit, his life was insupportable.’ Temperance, moreover, had social aims, and so did official worries
over drunkenness. The problem was not inebriation or binge-drinking, but
drunkenness as habit: this was what caused pauperism and the rampant evils
that were the neglect of work, family, and Sabbath. The same model, in turn,
applied to Chinese opium-smokers: ‘To satisfy that inclination, he will
sacrifice everything – his own welfare, the subsistence of his wife and children,
E.g. England and China (London, ), p. ; Opium: the opium trade with China, its effect, etc.
(reprinted from the Glasgow Argus of September ), p. ; ‘The opium and the China question’,
Blackwood’s Magazine, p. ; ‘Iniquities’, Eclectic Review, pp. –; and R. Inglis in Commons
Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. , c. .
Thelwall, The iniquities of the opium trade, pp. –.
A digest of the despatches on China, p. .
‘The missionaries, and the Christian opium-smugglers in China’, Christian Observer (Oct.
), pp. –.
‘Opium, opium-eaters, the opium trade with China’, Saturday Magazine ( Nov. ),
p. .
Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. ; and on the difference between temperance and
teetotalism, pp. –.
Bynum, ‘Chronic alcoholism’, p. ; quote from Robert Armitage, A sermon on the
common evils of drunkenness (London, ), p. .
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
and neglect his work.’ Even if this was a moralistic view, the ‘moral’ problems
originated in the habit-forming properties of the substances in question.
Neither was, finally, opium’s unregulated status in Britain the sign of an
absence of notions of addiction, on the contrary. One reason for such restraint
was simply that opium was needed as a painkiller. Yet the absence of a ban also
reflected the strong contemporary prejudices against government intervention
in the private sphere that were also at work in the drinks sector. Free-trade
Liberalism was hostile on principle to prohibitions on products such as
alcohol or opium. Relaxations on gin and beer-house licensing, including the
Beer Act, had been intended to remedy the drink problem, the argument
being that ‘government regulation and taxation lent a spurious glamour to
selling and consuming strong drink’.
The lack of a ban, in the Victorian context, arguably only supports the idea
that contemporaries saw opium as habit-inducing. It was suggested that bans
made demand stronger, both because they made trafficking more profitable
and the product itself more attractive as forbidden fruit. This, indeed, was
one of the core arguments of the war case:
The fact is plain to any one who is the least acquainted with the people, that to put an
immediate stop to a custom which has taken such hold of them is impossible; no
measures, however severe, can entirely succeed; thousands are ready to risk their
lives to procure the drug, and there are thousands who, from long habit, would, if
deprived of it, prefer to be in their graves.
‘Such is the infatuation of the Chinese, that they will endeavour to procure the
drug at all hazards’, wrote the Illustrated London News to explain why it would be
useless for Britain to abandon the opium trade. In parliament, Macaulay
asked:
Did they suppose that a traffic supported on the one hand by men actuated by the
love of a drug, from the intoxicating qualities of which they found it impossible to
restrain themselves; and on the other, by persons actuated by the desire of gain,
could be terminated by the publication of a piece of paper signed ‘Charles Elliot’?
The point was of course self-serving, bordering, in some cases, on dishonesty. The Hobhouse memoirs suggest that the premier, Lord Melbourne,
was nevertheless for one sincere in believing it. More significantly, it was
‘On the preparation of opium’, Foreign Quarterly Review, pp. –.
Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, pp. –.
Jocelyn, Six months with the Chinese expedition, p. .
‘The opium trade’, Illustrated London News ( July ), p. .
Commons Debate, Hansard’s parliamentary debates, Third Series, vol. , Apr. ,
c. .
E.g. Manchester Guardian, Mar. , p. , and Nov. , p. ; Globe, Apr. ,
p. ; A digest of the despatches on China, pp. and ; Review of the management of our affairs in
China (London, ), pp. –; and Bingham, Narrative of the expedition to China, I, p. .
John Cam Hobhouse, Recollections of a long life ( vols., London, –), V, p. .
P. E. CAQUET
sometimes recycled by opponents of the war and of the opium traffic itself,
parties that had persistently written against both, for example the Record and
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. Alcohol prohibition had yet to appear on the temperance agenda, and while exact levels of regulation continued as the object of
heated political debate, it remained a typical early Victorian solution to legalize
and tax, while preaching moderation. Through education and abstinence, freetraders expected to ‘work harmoniously with temperance reformers’ and, for
them, the private was separate from the legal sphere. ‘Moral evils are to be
met by moral cures’, as wrote the author of the Digest of the despatches.
Opium’s legal status in Britain was thus compatible with an understanding of
drug dependence. So were comparisons of opium with dram-drinking which
anyhow mainly tended to conflate them as social ills. Meanwhile, as the terms
of the Opium War debate suggest, there can be said to have existed an appreciation that opium was habit-forming among at least part of the reading
public, a layman’s notion of addiction. None of this need contradict the
disease theory of addiction, nor the historical process by which opium and
other drugs became the object of penalization in Britain three-quarters of a
century later. That it was the medical body, and the forging of a scientific consensus, that eventually prompted the authorities to action need not be gainsaid.
Yet nor must one be beholden to a Foucault-based model by which knowledge is
always handed from the top down and in the interests of control. Lay notions of
addiction may well have pre-existed and, as Berridge herself hints was the case,
they likely informed the disease theory itself.
V
The leaders who committed Britain to the First Opium War, and the political
nation which, with some doubt and after much debate supported them,
plainly identified opium as a noxious drug. That it was something dangerous
that was being sold, at the point of a gun, into China was, as the debate is evidence, well-nigh universally realized. The terms employed to describe opium,
the breadth of the campaign led by the daily press, and the nature of the war
case all suggest a widespread understanding of opium’s character. Scarcely
more than a narrow band of people with a vested interest in its trade were prepared to defend opium itself. The war saw the publication of a broad literature
evincing an implicit understanding of what would come to be termed drug dependence and regularly providing explicit accounts of it. Many, if perhaps not
Record, Mar. , p. , and Apr. , p. ; ‘The closing events of the campaign in
China’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (Aug. ), p. .
Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. . As Harrison notes, pp. –, prohibitionism
only arose, under American influence, in the s. See also Virginia Berridge, Demons: our
changing attitudes to alcohol, tobacco, & drugs (Oxford, ), pp. –.
A digest of the despatches on China, p. .
Berridge, Opium and the people, pp. xxiv–v and –; Berridge, Demons, p. .
ADDICTION AND THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
all, were aware that opium was habit-forming, and there can even be said to have
existed, at the time, a layman’s notion of drug addiction in Britain.
How widely shared such notions may have been among the population at large is
more difficult to ascertain. The Chinese historian Shijie Guan has attempted to
gauge British working-class attitudes towards opium through the Chartist literature. The Northern Star certainly set itself boisterously against the war. Yet
Chartism was a virulent opposition movement and only likely to attack cabinet policies, and temperance Chartism, whose main aim was to combat class prejudices
about the drunken masses, risks having coloured the message. Parliamentary petitions hint at popular mobilization, and Opium War petitions arrived from locations
as diverse as London, Darling, Liverpool, Leeds, Worcester, Maidstone, St Albans,
Bishops Stortford, Galashiels, and ‘some place in Somerset’, some of them with
thousands of signatures protesting a ‘dishonourable and immoral’ trade that
was ‘enervating and impoverishing the consumers of the drug’. Yet this was
an era of mass petitioning, and the motives behind these petitions are not always
legible, even if one excludes those presented by temperance societies.
Perhaps the opium users themselves, finally, and friends and families or
indeed ordinary bystanders, were occasionally able to conclude that opiumtaking was compulsive from observation. In some regions such as the Fens or
Lincolnshire, the drug appears to have been taken extensively by the poor.
Opium consumption in Britain was, in , the equivalent of around
chests, or around one sixth of China’s on a per capita basis. This was the
equivalent of more than doses per man, woman, and child per year and,
based on these statistics, some and perhaps most British opium consumption
must have been recreational. At about the same time that Lin was confiscating the Canton opium chests, the writer and chemist William Howitt observed:
I have contemplated with horror the rapid increase of the consumption of opium,
and its spirituous laudanum, within the last ten years. The ravenous fierceness,
with which opium-eaters enter the druggists’ shops, when want of money has kept
them from their dose beyond their accustomed time of using it, and the trembling
impatience with which they watch the weighing of the drug (every moment appearing to them an age), and the avidity with which they will seize and tear off their
wonted dose, and swallow it – are frightful to be seen; yet must have been seen by
many on such occasions.
Shijie Guan, ‘Chartism and the First Opium War’, History Workshop, (), pp. –.
Morning Chronicle, Apr. , p. ; Fry, Facts and evidence, p. ; and Wen-Tsao Wu, The
Chinese opium question and British opinion and action (New York, NY, ), p. .
Berridge, Opium and the people, pp. –; Leeds Mercury, Dec. , p. ; ‘Opium
smuggling in China’, Penny Magazine ( Mar. ), p. .
Berridge, Opium and the people, p. . One chest contained about lbs. For Chinese
imports, see Inglis, The Opium War, p. .
‘Consumption of opium’, Examiner ( Apr. ), p. .
William Howitt, ‘Nooks of the world – a visit to the Whitworth doctors’, Tait’s Edinburgh
Magazine (Apr. ), p. .
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