The Opium War and the Opening of China: A Historiographical Note

-2The Opium War and the Opening of China A Historiographical Note Di lip K. Bas u Board of Studies in History University of California, Santa Cruz The old China trade and the Opium Wars are a well-worn subject. Since W. Milburn published his classic compendiums (Oriental Commerce, 2 vols., London, 1813), and S.W. Williams his brilliant treatise (The Middle Kingdom, London, 1848), the spate of scholarly and popular works has continued. The most recent works are by Peter Ward Fay (The Opium War, North Carolina Press, 1975), Edward V. Gulick (Peter Parker and the Opening of China, Harvard University Press, 1973), Jack Beeching (The Chinese Opium Wars, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19 75), and John W. Wong (Yeh Ming-chen: Viceroy of Liang Kuang, Cambridge university Press, 1976). In addition, the forthcoming Cambridge History of China, Vol, V will have contributions by Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and John King Fairbank. A major reason for the plethora of works on China trade and Opium War is the richness of extant sources in Western languages and archives. Another reason is the nature of the subject matter which fascinated every missionary, trader, traveler, or proconsul with a literary penchant enough to pursuade him to put his experiences in writing if not in print These sources still excite the enthusiasm of many a popular writer. We cannot therefore say with any degree of assurance that we have seen the Last work on the Opium War period. For one thing, despite the vast coverage, not all the importan+ archives especially those in Chinese have been exhausted. As scholars continue to comb them, the question of a balanced, systematic approach still remains to be resolved. During imperialism's heyday, interpretive issues were locked in a dual battle: Chinese nationalists and communists chafing under foreign domination argued against the detrimental aspects of the Opium War and the Treaty Ports system; most Western scholars on the other hand concentrated on pointing out the benefits that accrued to China as a result of its opening and exposure to the West. Broadly, these can be termed "detriment" and "benefit" theories. In recent times, the detriment theories have been restated in structural and dialectical terms, while the benefit dimensions have been reformulated in the rubric of various modernization categories and concepts. The purpose of this note is to provide a tour d'horizon of the major, by no means all, literature with a focus on the drain of wealth question (the other particular issues are addressed in the papers of this Supplement) in the context of the benefit and detriment theories. Another purpose is to point up the important archival sources which remain to be tapped, and the direction which a balanced, systematic approach should take. Detriment and Benefit Theories The phenomenal growth of the opium trade in the 1820s and '3Os caused a massive hemorrhage in the Chinese economy. The cash-and-carry basis of the oid China trade was gone; instead there were actual shipments of cargoes of bullion out of China. The first reaction naturally came from the officials. Memorials urging a crackdown on the traffic started to pour into the Court alleging the outflow of huge quantities of silver In L837 a censor claimed that the annual drain (lou-chihl was in the amount it- TIs 10,000,000 from -4Kwangtung , Tis. 10,000,000 from the South China coast north of Kwangtung and Tis.. 20,000,000 from Tientsin, making a total of Tis. 60,000,000. It was clearly a staggering figure. Early nineteenth century European writers like Charles Gutzlaff (1838) , Montgomery Martin (1847), W. A. P. Martin (1847), S.W. Williams (1848) mention 2 or refer to the drain. But their overriding concern or interest in the "opening" of China obscured this as a substantive issue. Manchu insolence in respect to the demands for liberal trading and preaching rights in China's interior had so firmly etched itself in the Western psyche that even the more thoroughgoing writers failed to examine the question of drain. H. B. Morse's Chronicles (1926-29) based on the summaries of the East India Company's China records first provided the empirical framework for testing its extent, although...