Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-British Cultural Relations ed. by Peter J. Kitson and Robert Markley (review)

One vibrant aspect of eighteenth-century studies today is East-West cultural and commercial relations and networks. Britain, inevitably, still stands at the nexus of these networks, though the margins of European consciousness have increasingly been brought into view—as in the volume under review—in scholarship that questions nation-based, Eurocentric views, while enriching British historiography itself. David Porter has articulated what he calls the "sinicization" of early modernity, and, linked to the "new cosmopolitanism," these discourses inform an interesting body of work by literary scholars on Sino-British relations from within postcolonial, materialist, and global perspectives (see Porter, "Sinicizing Early Modernity: The Imperatives of Historical Cosmopolitanism,"ECS 43, no. 3 (2010): 299–306; and Mary Helen McMurran, "The New Cosmopolitanism and the Eighteenth Century," ECS 47, no. 1 [2013]: 19–38).

Writing China explores the Amherst embassy to China of 1816, which—like Macartney's (1792–94)—failed to achieve its commercial or political goals; however, its historical implications are fascinating, and pertinent to the Opium Wars and to the economic, political, and social development of China. The book works along two trajectories. One pertains to the tension between Orientalism and Sinology, to the appropriation of an exotic "China" on the one hand, and the gradual discovery of a linguistic and historical reality on the other. This narrative about how China was misperceived by the British, and how it led to the Opium wars, is articulated in this volume with fresh insights, although this narrative has long characterized the "oriental" turn in studies of the long eighteenth century.

A second trajectory describes the multilayered dynamic between China and Britain. The volume, the editors say, "argue[s] that the Chinese contributions to the culture of the British literature and culture generally was substantial and not simply a one-way process but . . . an exchange of ideas and knowledge and . . . part of a wider, global process" (6). This may be so, but the emphasis still falls on British (mis) per cep tions rather than on "exchange," though—with varying degrees of success—Writing China does produce a "thicker" historiography of Sino-British relations during the Qing dynasty.

The essays fall into four groups. Robert Markley persuasively brings together ecocriticism and global historiography to illuminate events of 1815–16, especially the extraordinary, worldwide effects of the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which, in the absence of a scientific understanding of volcanology, were seen by the Amherst embassy as a political failure of the Chinese regime, as proof of moral and socioeconomic corruption, and even as evidence of divine retribution (83). Peter Kitson interestingly argues that the Amherst embassy developed a rhetoric that obscured the primacy of opium in British political and commercial policy, "the dark gift in the real exchange of commerce" (73). While the shrewd Jiaqing emperor resisted this rhetoric and sent the British packing, opium nonetheless became central to how China was defined by Britain—not only by those in the embassy, but also by others like Thomas De Quincey, for whom "China" was a dangerous figment of his own opium-addicted fantasy.

This theme is developed by Eugenia Zuroski, who analyzes how De Quincey's "semiotic entanglement" (108) of tea and opium in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) appropriates tea as essentially English, while branding opium as a foreign pollutant. De Quincey sees "the complicated effects of Britain's metabolization of global trade as a form of psychological confusion caused literally by the ingestion of a foreign substance" (Zuroski, 107)—not tea (as Jonas Hanway would have it), but opium. Quite right, therefore, according to De Quincey, that Britain "trades" opium to China, for they are "incapable of a true civilization . . . and incurably savage in the moral sense" (De Quincey, "The Opium and the China Question," 1840, quoted on 115).

Elizabeth Chang...