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8 - The “Sphere of Interest”: Framing Late Nineteenth-Century China in Words and Pictures with Isabella Bird
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
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8 The “Sphere of Interest”: Framing Late Nineteenth-Century China in Words and Pictures with Isabella Bird Susan Morgan By the early nineteenth century the prevailing political notion in England of what constituted British interest in the “East” was typically represented, in imaginative if not in literal terms, as an overarching purpose which could unite a whole range of British activities in the region. Everything was somehow connected. What the British did on the Indian subcontinent and in the Straits Settlements, the Malay Peninsula, the East Indies and China, was all of a piece. What connected these multiple, particular, and scattered British activities in the places the British called the “East” was, first of all, an idea. It was captured in the phrase invoked again and again to describe and defend British imperial enterprise: “the China trade.” Within the spacious rubric defined at the beginning of the century by William Pitt the Younger, that “British policy is British trade,”1 the “China trade” held a special place. The phrase functioned as a sort of lodestar for the whole notion of seagoing trade, as valued by the little island that was Britain. The “China trade” would be the best trade, the biggest trade, “potentially the most important in the world,”2 with virtually unlimited consumers as well as goods. Stamford Raffles “founded” Singapore in 1819 and the British officially bought it from the Sultan of Johore in 1824 for a lot of reasons, the foremost being to provide a port between India and China for the sake of the “China trade.” “The Malay Peninsula became a place of significance for the English precisely in terms of its geographic proximity to India, as the land fronting the waterway from India to China.”3 There was, of course, a wealth of material and imagined purposes for the historical processes which we have come to gather under the heading of British imperialism. These purposes are as varied as the many places and economic, political, and cultural conditions in which the British were to be found. My point here is simply that a usually implicit but always present aspect of nineteenth-century British writings about China 106 Susan Morgan was that they existed within a particular pre-existing rhetorical and ideological frame. That frame was, in its largest sense, the magical notion of the “China trade.” Tied to that notion was another one, also a given in British writings about China. This was that China, as the endlessly repeated metaphor went, was a sleeping giant and, as Napoleon was said to have remarked, “when she wakes she will astonish the world.”4 If one of the tropes of British writings was that the “China trade” was the pot of gold which would reward ambitious British trading interests, another was that China itself was a place of almost unimaginable economic potential. Therefore, almost as a moral imperative, China should not, as well as could not, be left alone. While the Qing rulers of China did not seem to realize that the country needed to fulfill its commercial destiny within the global marketplace, other nations, first merchants and then governments, did. The question for these foreign imperial powers was how to persuade China. There was always that bedrock of British policy, gunboat diplomacy. The British had relied on it throughout the “East” and throughout the nineteenth century in China. Beginning in 1839, the British navy was central to British victories in the Opium Wars. As late as 1898 Sir Claude M. MacDonald, Britain’s minister at Beijing, pressing China to cede the port of Weihaiwei in Shandong to Britain, sent the warning that, “if not affirmative, matter would be placed in Admiral’s hands.”5 But in the simplest practical terms, force and the threat of force could never hold together an empire, certainly not an empire of trade. As Thomas Richards so memorably put it, “an empire is partly a fiction” and “the narratives of the late nineteenth century are full of fantasies about an empire united not by force but by information.”6 “Opening” China, then, became in part, to borrow James Hevia’s insightful term, a “pedagogical project,” a matter of teaching “the Qing elite and the Chinese people in general through various means of coercion and enticement how to function properly in a world dominated militarily and economically by European-based empires.”7 If the challenges were many, the rewards were, or surely would be, great. Implicit...