Merchants of War and Peace : British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War.
- HK : Hong Kong University Press, (c)2017.
- 1 online resource (241 pages)
Includes bibliographies and index.
Prologue; Map of the Pearl River Delta in the 1830s; 1. Introduction; 2. The Warlike and Pacific Parties; 3. Breaking the Soft Border; 4. Intellectual Artillery; 5. A War of Words over 'Barbarian'; 6. Reasoning Britain into a War; 7. The Regret of a Nation; 8. Conclusions: Profit Orders of Canton; Acknowledgements; Notes; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.
Merchants of War and Peace challenges conventional arguments that the major driving forces of the First Opium War were the infamous opium smuggling trade, the defence of British national honour, and cultural conflicts between 'progressive' Britain and 'backward' China. Instead, it argues that the war was started by a group of British merchants in the Chinese port of Canton in the 1830s, known as the 'Warlike party'. Living in a period when British knowledge of China was growing rapidly, the Warlike party came to understand China's weakness and its members returned to London to lobby for interv.