War is never inevitable. However, historians have used a variety of arguments to assert that the first Opium War was an inevitable consequence of Anglo-Chinese commercial contact. In 1907, a missionary W.A.P. Martin, in his book The Awakening of China, has viewed the war as a result of series of collisions between the conservatism of the Orient and the progressive spirit of the West, and also because China was backward and unable to change with the times. Earl Pritchard claimed that the British and the Chinese ‘thought and acted in a way almost directly opposed to one another.’ Unlike Britain’s experience in Europe, China developed in relative isolation and refused to accept the British government’s demands to be treated as equals. As British merchants expanded their economic connections with the Chinese, the lack of any diplomatic relations, which might have peacefully settled conflicts between the two countries, made an armed contest unavoidable.
The deep-seated cultural differences had a major role in the outbreak of hostilities in 1839. However, if this war had been fought to remove these differences then the war would have been fought much earlier and not as late as when the opium crisis developed. Thus, interpretations that rest on cultural differences fail to fully explain the motivation behind the first Anglo-Chinese war.
Historians, such as Michael Greenberg, have found the source of the inevitable tensions between the British and the Chinese in Britain’s expanding modern economy. They argue that in the early 19th century British merchants and industrialists, the new dynamic players in the British economy, forced Parliament to abolish the East India Company’s monopoly of the China trade. They also wanted to break down the Chinese government’s restrictions on trade, embodied in the Canton system, thus opening China’s market to goods produced by Britain’s expanding industrial economy. With the abolition of the Company’s monopoly in 1834, the newly created British Trade Commission actively pressed for a formal commercial treaty and even sought to an excuse to wage war to force the Chinese into submission.
According to Tan Chung and J.Y. Wong, the East India Company needed the expansion of the China trade- opium exports – in order to finance the government of India and to pay for Chinese tea, a highly prized commodity in Britain. When Commissioner Lin tried to put an end to the illegal drug trade, a response by the British government was inevitable, because the Indian government and its tea investment in China could not survive without the money derived from the sale of opium.
The viewpoints of the economic theorists have been refuted by many historians who do no regard them as convincing.
John Byng wrote an account of the Chinese-British encounters in his book Embassy to China in which he argues that the war which broke out between China and Britain was a trade war, a conflict which occurred because China failed to respond to the western approaches which the West had made through several missions such as the Lord McCartney and Lord Amherst missions. If China had opened up to the West and removed all restrictions war could have easily been averted. China was denying the western countries their natural right to trade. China had failed to modernize their ideas as far as commercial perspectives were concerned.
Historians like Hsin Pao Chang have pointed out that it was only in the early 19th century that the British resentment increased against the Chinese regulations and this resentment had occurred because of the changing economic conditions arising out of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of merchant capitalism. Britain’s needs had changed which inevitably would have resulted in a conflict with the Chinese authorities. Chang has called the war fought between Britain and China as a “trade war” since trade held the focal point in the conflict, the nature of the trade being irrelevant.
Tan Chung argues that the struggle against the suppression of the opium trade led the British to use their military strength. He believes that the basic cause of the war was British commercial expansion on the one hand and the Chinese trying to contain their expansion on the other. He has also carried out a detailed study of the circumstances and characteristics that led to the First Opium War. He is of the belief that the initiative of the war lay with the British. Britain’s motives for launching a war against the Chinese were: firstly, to stop the Manchu anti-opium campaign; and secondly, to salvage her booming business in the Sino opium trade and also to pressurize China to allow her to further extend her influence into China.
According to Victor Purcell, “it was opium which finally brought China and Britain into collision”.
Thus, the entire trade triangle of Indian opium for the Chinese, Chinese tea for the British and the British Raj for Indians played a decisive role, leading to the outbreak of the first Opium War.