The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another

Today it seems incredible, but not that long ago a liberal and presumably "progressive" nation forced a weaker one to accept the importation of opium at the point of a sword. Tea grown on Chinese plantations was already a staple of the British diet in the 1830s. Frequently, British merchants paid for the tea with the profits gleaned from massive smuggling of opium into Chinese ports. Opium, first imported into China by Arab traders during the Middle Ages, had cut a devastatingly wide swath through Chinese society, with a large percentage of the army and the bureaucracy addicted. When the Chinese government attempted to prohibit both the use and the smuggling of the drug, Britain launched two wars between 1839 and 1860 to force open Chinese ports. Hanes is a historian and educator who specializes in British imperial history; Sanello is a film critic and author of numerous books on films and history. Their account of the causes, military campaigns, and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre, and deeply unsettling. Jay Freeman