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3 Traveling Imperialism: Lord Elgin’s Missions to China and the Limits of Victorian Liberalism Q. S. Tong Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action. The reason for this surprising originality — surprising because entirely new concepts are very rare in politics — is simply that this concept is not really political at all, but has its origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broadening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of the nineteenth century. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 125 James Bruce (1811–63), the Eighth Earl of Elgin, was a traveler, an imperial traveler. In his professional life over a period of about twenty years, he was sent by the British Empire on numerous “difficult and unwelcome” errands and traveled to different parts of the world as a colonial administrator — governor of Jamaica, governor-general of Canada, plenipotentiary to China and Japan, and viceroy of India.1 Elgin’s name and reputation, however, are mainly built on his two missions to China, in 1857 and 1859 respectively, during the Arrow war or the Second Opium War, as it is known in Chinese historiography.2 Towards the end of his life, he recalled, not without some feeling of ambivalence, that he had “been for many years very much, perhaps too much of a wanderer” (L&J, 390). In the context of historical imperialism, especially in its more adventurist early period, “travel” was not just a movement from one place to another, but a required action for discovery, conquest, and acquisition. Imperialism is by definition necessarily “traveling,” given its innate desires to extend its domains of control and to expand its spheres of influence, primarily, though not exclusively, for economic interests and 40 Q. S. Tong trading privileges. Indeed, how could one speak of imperialism without at the same time thinking of travel as an essential part of its practice, as a mode of imperial action, as an embodiment of its materiality, and as a manifestation of its mobile attempts to explore and conquer, to colonize and rule, territories, near or far, for its self-realization and self-fulfillment? Empire has to be mobile, restless, adventurist, and aggressive; it does not know where or when to stop until it is forced to or is no longer able to move. J. R. Seeley, probably the most influential nationalistic historian of the British Empire, tells us that the history of Britain in the eighteenth century was written and enacted outside its boundaries, in America and in Asia;3 in the nineteenth century, the British Empire merely repeated, though on an enlarged scale, this history of territorial and commercial expansionism. In that sense, the history of the British Empire is collectively written by the imperial travelers like Elgin, who, by the act of “traveling,” turned England into Britain, and Britain into Great Britain, which was hoped to become “Greater Britain.” Elgin’s missions to China are metonymic of a traveling imperialism, of a collective imperial movement, driven and defined by the need to materialize the empire’s vision of itself. No doubt, Elgin shared, endorsed and contributed to that vision. I The Second Opium War evidences, more manifestly than the First Opium War (1839– 42), the brutality and barbarity of British imperialism. It was a bloody war without justification, a war that started with a relatively slight dispute over the local Chinese government’s decision to seize and confiscate the pirate lorcha Arrow. Even though its register with the colonial administration of Hong Kong had expired and the crew arrested were all Chinese, its seizure was nevertheless determined as a violation of British sovereignty and an insult to the empire’s honor.4 John Bowring, the governor of Hong Kong at the time, demanded compensation and an official apology from the Imperial Commissioner Yeh in Guangzhou and having received neither, insisted that the military option be taken and British troops be dispatched to punish the Chinese. An ardent advocate of free trade and, as Marx called him, “a pet disciple” of the great patriarch of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham,5 Bowring had already made a name for himself in the public life of Britain, as a philosophic radical, a linguist, and a prominent traveler before he...

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