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9. The “scramble for the use of Macau”
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
97 Throughout the eighteenth century, the EIC became dependent on private trade conducted between India and Southern China whereby Indian opium reached Canton, the purchase of tea requiring silver earned through the sale of that drug. Since the previous century the Portuguese had been importing opium into China, and Macau ultimately became a strategic space for British smuggling until it moved to the island of Lintin. This move affected the revenues of the enclave’s traders, who defended themselves from the competition on finding themselves deprived of one of their major sources of income and fearing that the Lintin island might be occupied by the British.2 The Chinese traders also profited from this trafficking, which therefore rendered ineffectual the imperial edicts banning the importing of the drug into China. In its first phase, this situation dragged on until the Opium War, after which Britain finally succeeded in founding an establishment in China. In the 1760s, Britain already held the largest European percentage of the China Trade. British vessels arriving in Canton belonged either to the EIC and to interlopers using passports bearing the names of Portuguese businesses and residents,3 or to independent traders4 who engaged in the country trade between India and Southern China,5 with the Company wishing to control the activity of the latter.6 British trade was thus conducted by three discrete entities: the Company, which regulated every trading activity; private agents or traders who sailed between Britain and China via India under licence from the EIC; and the country traders, residing in India and operating in the main between India and the south of China, authorised to do so by the Company and the Indian traders, 9 The “scramble for the use of Macau”1 The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793 98 and trading also with the Chinese who operated outside the hong system and who were not legally authorised to do business with foreigners. Asian products, notably cotton imported from Bombay, pepper and opium supplied the EIC with approximately 30% of the capital needed to buy tea in China up to the second half of the eighteenth century, when opium trafficking became predominant. At first the Company imported opium from Bengal,7 the drug becoming a threat to public health in China; thus a 1729 imperial edict decreed that trading opium was illegal. The EIC banned the importing of opium from Calcutta, although this had no practical effect since the supercargoes trafficked the drug through their private trade and country traders smuggled the drug to China. In addition, the Chinese traders were not willing to give up such profitable transactions, which continued in a clandestine manner via Macau and later, Lintin.8 On arrival in the Pearl River delta, the British vessels docked at Taipa, and their tonnage was ascertained in the enclave or in Whampoa before the supercargoes reached Canton. Here the purchase of tea would have been impossible without the drug trade which also supplied significant profits to the British administration in India. One of the Company’s first major challenges was finding—besides textiles for which there was little demand—British products which were saleable in China, a self-sufficient nation, with a view to financing the purchase of tea. Until the Commutation Act, Swedish and Danish traders9 smuggled tea into Great Britain, avoiding the high taxes which British traders had to pay. The British opium was exchanged for silver in Canton by the country traders, and the EIC received the precious metal from them in exchange for letters of credit payable in London, by means of which the institution was able to pay for the tea it purchased.10 This system made for interdependence between the Company and the traders, and the amount of opium transported to Canton and the institution’s and the traders’ profits grew gradually until the first clashes of the Opium War (1839), when the Chinese authorities decided to try and put an end to the illegal trade of the drug. Controlling the country traders became difficult, given the Company’s economic dependence on them and on trade agents, some of whom also began to take up residence in Macau between trading seasons. The traders and some of Macau’s governors gained part of the profit yielded by smuggling opium11 [34.228.213.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:33 GMT) The “scramble for the use of Macau” 99 and trading tea, collaborating successively with the British.12 In so doing, they benefited...