The Opium War and the World Trade System

-47The Opium War and the World Trade System Di lip K. Basu While the Opium War (1840-42) was a cataclysmic event and probably the most significant turning point in China's long history, remarked the late Professor Joseph R. Levenson, it was only an episode in the annals of the British empire. As in much of his brilliant work, this statement reflects Levenson' s concern with the inherent relativism of historical perspective and its comparative, cross-cultural dimension. But it also reflects the conventional wisdom (no fault of Levenson' s for he was not an Opium War scholar) based on the standard interpretation of the Opium War. In this view, neither the opium trade nor the war was of central importance. As Palmerston bluntly put it before the House of Commons, the war had a three- fold aim — reparations for insults to Elliot and others, indemnity for confiscated property and security for future trade. The "episode" occurred during the mid-Victorian "indifference" to imperial expansion, at the height of the popularity of the laissez faire -- the Free Trade — dogma. The Free Trade protagonists were willing to limit the use of paramount power in contrast to the mercantilist use of powet to obtain commercial supremacy through political possession. The victory of the Free Traders resulting in the abolition of the East India company 's China trade monopoly, the argument runs, buried the possibility »t the extension of the British empire Erom India to China. The ideological jrientation of the House of Commons in the 1830' s would not simply permit ¦.' Why was the wai still waged An equation >f hiñese and Brit ist- war goai - «as suggested -48the refusal of equal status was as great an irritant to the British as opium smuggling was to the Chinese government. It was, however, John Quincy Adaas rather than Palmerston who succinctly summed up the ideological position by defining the war as a "kowtow" war while opium was a "mere incident to the dispute ... no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard the tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American revolution." In this paper, I wish to emphasize the centrality of opium, both trade and war, from the standpoint of an expansive world trade system. The latter refers to those specific conjunctures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which in effect replaced the bilateral basis of the old trade by multilateralism. In the Asian trade arena, this refers to the quadrangular, no doubt uneven and unequal, relationships that emerged between Britain, the British Indian colonial state, the U.S. and Ch'ing China. Because of the importance of the Spanish silver dollar in trade transactions, Hispanic Philippines also played a crucial role. Although I am using the term "system" as a heuristic device in order to delineate the changes in the world trade structure, its affil4 iation to Immanuel Wallerstein 's world-systems approach is obvious. The general concept of world systems has two varieties: world empire (with a common political structure), and world economy (without a single political structure). Contact and trade between these two entities historically have taken place at "external arenas," Wallerstein's term for trade in preciosities in bureaucratically -administered Canton commercial system-like outfit. The success of this form of trade depended largely on the politico-technological ability of the long-distance traders to transport the material. The emergence in the sixteenth-century Western Europe of the essential elements of a capitalist world economy based on a single world division of labor, production for profit in this market, capital accumulation for expanded reproduction for maximizing profit, the rise of three zones of economic activity — core, semiperiphery and periphery — -49began to qualitatively alter the situation of the external arenas. The boundaries of the world capitalist economy slowly expanded to include the entire world much of which was "peripheralized," while the locus of the "core" remained in the West and more recently in North America. In the term semi-periphery , Wallerstein has added a refreshingly new dimension. Semi-peripheral areas maintain a balance between core-like and periphery-like economic activities, often performing a direct "police," and/or back-up...