Imperial Addiction, History of the Opium Wars

What happens when a profitable commodity collides with an empire determined to protect its trade?Imperial Addiction: History of the Opium Wars explores the dramatic history of the Opium Wars, the conflicts that transformed relations between Qing China and the Western powers and helped reshape the political and commercial order of nineteenth-century Asia.At the center of the story was opium—but the real conflict involved far more than a drug. British merchants wanted access to the enormous Chinese market, the Qing government sought to restrict the devastating opium trade, and disputes over commerce, diplomacy, sovereignty, and foreign access gradually pushed the two sides toward confrontation.From the Canton trade system and the expansion of the British opium economy to the destruction of confiscated opium, naval warfare, the First Opium War, and the Treaty of Nanking, this book follows the chain of events that turned a commercial dispute into an international crisis. It also examines the Second Opium War, the expansion of foreign privileges, the opening of additional Chinese ports, and the growing pressures placed on the Qing Empire.Along the way, the history reveals an extraordinary cast of merchants, officials, diplomats, military commanders, reformers, and ordinary people caught inside a rapidly changing world.The Opium Wars were not simply battles over a commodity. They were conflicts over trade, sovereignty, diplomacy, imperial power, addiction, and access to one of the world's largest markets.Part history of commerce, part history of imperialism, and part cautionary tale about what happens when money, power, and diplomacy develop an extremely unhealthy relationship, Imperial Addiction brings one of the defining conflicts of nineteenth-century China into sharp, readable focus.