Despite a commitment (mostly in name only) to a civilizing ideology, Europeans made fortunes from their various empires. The initial conquest of India created nabobs like Clive who entered into the British aristocracy. Still the profits of rule could be minimal such as the Portuguese found out in Mozambique and Angola or the French in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) and Niger. Paid in colonial currency that forced participation in the colonial economy, taxes ensured the colonies would pay for themselves with the excesses (including half of India’s revenues) shipped out of the colony. Additionally, the movement of products, especially opium, furthered the profits of empire. The crop was grown cheaply in India, where it provided needed tax revenue to the local British government, taken by private traders, and then sold in China. For the first time since the British began their trade with the Chinese, the British possessed something the Chinese desired (besides silver) and had the upper hand in exchanging it for highly coveted Chinese goods, such as tea and silk. When the Chinese expressed a new reluctance to buying opium, they worked to limit the trade by targeting Chinese traders and consumers. The British, in support of free trade, and wanting to sustain the profits they were making started the First Opium War in 1839. and forcing territorial concessions (for example the British took the territory of Hong Kong) and new rights (such as for missionaries to freely convert others). The immediate cause of the war can be debated between the Chinese scholar-bureaucrat Lin Zexu’s actions, the political influence in London that many traders possessed or an unavoidable clash of long-term competing economic and political interests.As a result, a new wave of opium flooded into China through British merchants, now using faster clipper ships, distributed then by Chinese middlemen to increasingly addicted and poor Chinese consumers (who were increasingly portrayed as unredeemable drug addicts), destabilizing the Qing dynasty and contributing to long-term anti-British resentment.
Personal overview: William Jardine
Figure 6: William Jardine
Much like the generation of imperialists before him who made their fortunes plundering India, William Jardine (24 February 1784 – 27 February 1843) realized the wealth offered in the expanding British empire. Jardine was a resident in China from 1820 to 1839. His early success in Canton as a commercial agent for opium merchants in India led to his admission in 1825 as a partner and by 1826 he controlled that firm’s Canton operations. Making his fortune, Jardine said: “Opium is the safest and most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of.” In 1839, Jardine successfully persuaded the British Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston, to wage war on China, providing maps, strategies, numbers of soldiers needed, and the specific demands to make. Although the war recreated a popular backlash among the British population who viewed as a fight for merchants’ profits, Jardine only increased his wealth, dying one of the richest men in Britain having served in Parliament–thus highlighting the fusion of politics and imperial rule as well as the profits of imperial trade.
Letter of Advice from Lin Zexu to Queen Victoria, 1839:
All those people in China who sell opium or smoke opium should receive the death penalty. We trace the crime of those barbarians who through the years have been selling opium, then the deep harm they have wrought and the great profit they have usurped should fundamentally justify their execution according to law.
Effects
The new globalized world created negative implications for non-Europeans. Native peoples of the United States, Canada, and Australia were killed off, forced to resettle, and denied basic rights in the lands where they were born. New laws work to limit the movement of native peoples, prevented them from changing jobs and any form of alleged inspiration, no matter how minor, resulted in detention. For example, in the kipande system in Kenya, the simple writing of ‘unfit’ in the native workbook ensured that obtaining new employment would be impossible. Conversely, the circulation of people, ideas, information, literature, humanitarian concerns, capital, controversies, technology, and goods around this empires (conceptualize them as an interlinking web) in varied ways and furthered the globalization of the world. Overall, both the settler colonies and migrants (described above) and non-settler colonial territories abroad (see below) furthered global aspects of European power as they funded European development, provided raw materials to European industries and ensured cheap sources of food for European people.
