Causes Of The Opium War

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The Opium War starts with the conflict between British and China, and ends with an unfair treaty and began the ‘century of Humiliation’. Before the 1800s, China, after its development through many centuries, revealed almost no difference with British and other European countries in many aspects such as agriculture, revenue & consumption, handicraft manufacturing and so on. It becomes diverse after British’s great technical improvements whereas China continued to stay in same situation over time. But that’s not the main causes of Opium War. The inevitability of this event is based on the economic and political factor, which lead to the outbreak of Opium War, and it remained an objectionable outcome by the Qing Government signing unequal Treaty …show more content…
For instance, the (British) East India Company is using 60% of silver to trade with only 30% of Chinese Tea. This imbalanced situation triggered the economic outlook, especially when famous East India Company is falling to a huge debt, and they still need pay for rising tariffs while trading with China. With the decrease of British economic interest, East India Co. ultimately decide to export Opium to ameliorate this condition in 1773. It was an ideal source to trade with China, where 10,000 pounds of Opium has been traded per month and vast number of silver is leaving out from China in next 5 years. During this period, there’s a subsequent increase in demanding Opium when over 2,000,000 people in China were readily addicted to this powerful drug. The company were vigorously exchanging widespread Opium for higher amount of silver and other supplies. On the other hand, it virtually improved Britain’s technical development and economic interest, while the Emperor Dao Guang was alarmed because China has a massive loss of silver and over 600,000 …show more content…
According to the period before Opium War, the Chinese Emperor Qian Long announced in 1792 that “An abundance of celestial property, it can be anything, the original nationality Yi goods to pass with or without outside.” This is what he tells to the British envoy George Macartney when he was appointed to expand the overseas markets in order to consolidate their capitalist development. The sentence generally means that Emperor Qian Long is still implementing the policy of “cutting one’s country from the outside world”, which he is trying to tell Macartney that they don’t need to make any trade and commerce with foreign goods and merchants. The famous professor from the University of Chicago, Kenneth Pomeranz, have claimed that the difference between British and China is “The Great Divergence”. China during that time continued to keep its conservative concept and style of “upgrading country by agriculture power” and forbid all interactions with other countries while western countries are slowing converted to Capitalism. Through the process, countries like Britain and U.S. already have a superb technical and economic development, but those Chinese elites still believed that their imperial power and other resources are highly sophisticated. Moreover, the Qing Government

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