3. K. Marx. History of the Opium Trade
3. K. Marx. History of the Opium Trade[5]
The news of the new treaty[2] wrung from China by the allied Plenipotentiaries has, it would appear, conjured up the same wild vistas of an immense extension of trade which danced before the eyes of the commercial mind in 1845, after the conclusion of the first Chinese war.(1) Supposing the Petersburg wires to have spoken truth, is it quite certain that an increase of the Chinese trade must follow upon the multiplication of its emporiums? Is there any probability that the war of 1857-8 will lead to more splendid results than the war of 1841-2? So much is certain that the treaty of 1843, instead of increasing American and English exports to China proved instrumental only in precipitating and aggravating the commercial crisis of 1847. In a similar way, by raising dreams of an inexhaustible market and by fostering false speculations, the present treaty may help preparing a new crisis at the very moment when the market of the world is but slowly recovering from the recent universal shock. Beside its negative result, the first opium-war succeeded in stimulating the opium trade at the expense of legitimate commerce, and so will this second opium-war do, if England be not forced by the general pressure of the civilized world to abandon the compulsory opium cultivation in India and the armed opium propaganda to China. We forbear dwelling on the morality of that trade, described by Montgomery Martin, himself an Englishman, in the following terms:
"Why, the slave trade was merciful compared with the opium trade: We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans, for it was our immediate interest to keep them alive; we did not debase their natures, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls.
But the opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded, and annihilated the moral being of unhappy sinners, while every hour is bringing new victims to a Moloch which knows no satiety, and where the English murderer and Chinese suicide vie with each other in offerings at his shrine.' 3
The Chinese cannot take both goods and drug; under actual circumstances, extension of the Chinese trade resolves into extension of the opium trade; the growth of the latter is incompatible with the development of legitimate commerce — these propositions were pretty generally admitted two years ago. A Committee of the House of Commons, appointed in 1847 to take into consideration the state of British commercial intercourse with China, reported thus:
"We regret that the trade with that country has been for some time in a very unsatisfactory condition, and that the result of our extended intercourse has by no means realized the just expectations which had naturally been founded in a free access to so magnificent a market. We find that the difficulties of the trade do not arise from any want of demand in China for articles of British manufactures, or from the increasing competition of other nations; the payment for opium absorbs the silver to the great inconvenience of the general traffic of the Chinese, and tea and silk must in fact pay the rest."b
The Friend of China, of July 28, 1849, generalizing the same proposition, says in set terms:
"The opium trade progresses steadily. The increased consumption of teas and silk in Great Britain and the United States would merely result in the increase of the opium trade; the case of the manufacturers is hopeless."
One of the leading American merchants in China reduced, in an article inserted in Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, for January, 1850, the whole question of the trade with China to this point:
"Which branch of commerce is to be suppressed, the opium trade or the export trade of American or English produce?"
The Chinese themselves took exactly the same view of the case. Montgomery Martin narrates:
"I inquired of the Taoutaic at Shanghai which would be the best means of increasing our commerce with China, and his first answer to me, in presence of Capt. Balfour, Her Majesty's Consul, was: 'Cease to send us so much opium and we will be able to take your manufactures.'"cf The history of general commerce during the last eight years has, in a new and striking manner, illustrated these positions; but, before analyzing the deleterious effects on legitimate commerce of the opium trade, we propose giving a short review of the rise and progress of that stupendous traffic, which, whether we regard the tragical collisions forming, so to say, the axis round which it turns, or the effects produced by it on the general relations of the Eastern and Western worlds, stands solitary on record in the annals of mankind.
Previous to 1767 the quantity of opium exported from India did not exceed 200 chests, the chest weighing about 133 lbs. Opium was legally admitted in China on the payment of a duty of about $3 per chest, as a medicine; the Portuguese who brought it from Turkey being its almost exclusive importers into the Celestial Empire.
In 1773, Colonel Watson and Vice-President Wheeler — persons deserving to take a place among the Hermentiers, Palmers and other poisoners of world-wide fame — suggested to the East India Company[7] the idea of entering upon the opium traffic with China. Consequently, there was established a depot for opium in vessels anchored in a bay to the southwest of Macao. The speculation proved a failure. In 1781 the Bengal Government sent an armed vessel, laden with opium, to China; and, in 1794, the Company stationed a large opium vessel at Whampoa, the anchorage for the port of Canton. It seems that Whampoa proved a more convenient depot than Macao, because, only two years after its selection, the Chinese Government found it necessary to pass a law which threatens Chinese smugglers of opium to be beaten with a bamboo and exposed in the streets with wooden collars around their necks. About 1798, the East India Company ceased to be direct exporters of opium, but they became its producers. The opium monopoly was established in India; while the Company's own ships were hypocritically forbidden from trafficking in the drug, the licenses it granted for private ships trading to China contained a provision which attached a penalty to them if freighted with opium of other than the Company's own make.
In 1800, the import into China had reached the number of 2,000 chests. Having, during the eighteenth century, borne the aspect common to all feuds between the foreign merchant and the national custom-house, the struggle between the East India Company and the Celestial Empire assumed, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, features quite distinct and exceptional;
while the Chinese Emperor,(2) in order to check the suicide of his people, prohibited at once the import of the poison by the foreigner, and its consumption by the natives, the East India Company was rapidly converting the cultivation of opium in India, and its contraband sale to China, into integral parts of its own financial system. While the semi-barbarian stood on the principle of morality, the civilized opposed the principle of pelf. That a giant empire, containing almost one-third of the human race, vegetating to the teeth of time, insulated by the forced exclusion of general intercourse, and thus contriving to dupe itself with delusions of Celestial perfection — that such an empire should at last be overtaken by the fate on occasion of a deadly duel, in which the representative of the antiquated world appears prompted by ethical motives, while the representative of overwhelming modern society fights for the privilege of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest markets — this, indeed, is a sort of tragical couplet, stranger than any poet would ever have dared to fancy.
Endnotes
[5] The heading is given according to Marx's Notebook for 1858, where the following entry is made: "31 Tuesday. History of the Opium Trade." p. 13
[2] The Bank Charter Act (An Act to Regulate the Issue of Bank-Notes, and for Giving to the Governor and Company of the Bank of England Certain Privileges for a Limited Period) was introduced by Robert Peel on July 19, 1844. It provided for the division of the Bank of England into two separate departments, each with its own cash account — the Banking Department, dealing exclusively with credit operations, and the Issue Department, issuing bank-notes. The Act limited the quantity of bank-notes in circulation and guaranteed them with definite gold and silver reserves which could not be used for the credit operations of the Banking Department. Further issues of bank-notes were allowed only in the event of a corresponding increase in the precious metal reserves. The issue of bank-notes by provincial banks was stopped. The Act was suspended several times by the government itself, in particular, during the monetary crises of 1847 and 1857. Marx analysed the Act of 1844 and its significance in a number of articles for the New-York Daily Tribune: "The Vienna Note.—The United States and Europe.— Letters from Shumla.— Peel's Bank Act" (see present edition, Vol. 12), "The English Bank Act of 1844 and the Monetary Crisis in Britain", "The British Revulsion" (Vol. 15). A detailed description of the Act was given by Marx later, in Vol. Ill of Capital (Chapter XXXIV).
[7] The British East India Company was founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It had the monopoly of trade with the East Indies and played a decisive part in establishing the British colonial empire. The East India Company's trade monopoly was abolished in 1813. The only exception was trade with China, the main articles of which were opium and tea. The Company was finally liquidated in 1858, during the popular Indian uprising of 1857-59. Marx gave a detailed description of the Company in his article "The East India Company — Its History and Results" (see present edition, Vol. 12).