Was the Opium War of 1840-42 a Just War?

-17Was the Opium War of 1840-42 a Just War? Peter Ward Fay Division of the Humanities and the Social Sciences California Institute of Technology "The opium trade from India to China," writes John K. Fairbank, "was the most long-continued systematic international crime of modern times." Fairbank is perhaps the best known living American Sinologist. He is distinguished and deservedly influential. I hesitate to disagree with him. But to call the opium trade the crime of crimes over the last century or so is, it seems to me, to forget the two African slave traffics, the one to the New World and the one to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf; is to forget what the Nazis concealed under the code phrase "final solution" and the survivors call "the holocaust" ; is to forget Budapest and Prague on one side of the imperialist ledger, Algeria and Vietnam on the other. David Livingstone and Hannah Arendt, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Frantz Fanon, would never allow Mr. Fairbank to place the opium trade above these. And neither should we. But suppose we assign the trade a less ambitious place on the ladder of infamy? Suppose, further, that we look not at the century and a half of its existence but at a particular war it gave a name to, the war England fought with China between 1840 and 1842. Practically nobody has ever called this anything but the "Opium War." And most of those who have called it the Opium War have done so, I do not doubt, with a degree of disapprobation. Here was an armed conflict precipitated by the confiscation, inside China's territorial waters, of twenty thousand chests of a seriously debilitating -18drug ; chests owned for the most part by British subjects; chests worth millions of dollars, in origin Indian (and India by that time translates loosely "British India") , and introduced into China in defiance of an official Chinese prohibition well advertised and of long standing. Had Canada, half a century ago, threatened hostilities with the United States because the Volstead Act excluded her whisky, or had Portugal at exactly the moment of our Opium War fought England because ships of the Royal Navy were seizing slavers and releasing their valuable cargoes, we might have something comparable . Why did England go to war with China? A war it was, I think we can safely say—though no war was ever declared, nor the formality of withdrawing ambassadors observed. (There were, of course, no ambassadors to withdraw. That was part of the trouble.) We can say it was a war because ships and regiments went out to China, swept bays and rivers, occupied towns, engaged such Chinese forces as chose (or dared) to oppose them, and desisted from these enterprises only when the Chinese government agreed to negotiate a settlement of certain matters at issue. That is why we can call it a war. Still, there remains something odd about the business. For the first thing we notice about the Treaty of Nanking, as the settlement is called, is that it says nothing about the opium traffic. Says nothing though we have tentatively agreed that it was opium that precipitated the war and gave it its name. It is a little as if the several treaties that closed the First World War, the treaties that bear so pleasantly the names of places just outside Paris, had neglected to make any arrangement for the permanent disposition of Bosnia. -19But , it will be remarked, the Treaty of St. Germain did not arrange things in the Balkans. It simply confirmed what the fighting had already accomplished: the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation, among other states, of Yugoslavia. Similarly the Treaty of Nanking, by fastening a sizable indemnity and other indignities upon the Chinese government, attested to the rightness of the opium traffic and promised its continuance and expansion. The drug as such did not require mention because, by the summer of 1842, it was clearly there to stay The trouble with this line of argument is that it confuses effect with intent. The Russians, the French, the Serbs even, did not begin the First World War with the intention...