Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [34]
The emperor’s representative appealed to the British. ‘Multitudes of our Chinese subjects consume it [opium], wasting their property and destroying their lives. How is it possible for us to refrain from forbidding our people to use it?’ he asked the British negotiator, Sir Henry Pottinger. But Pottinger had written orders and would not be budged. He also presented a massive bill for compensation due to the traders. On 17 August 1842, the emperor consented to the Treaty of Nanking, allowing the British a permanent presence at ports from Canton to Shanghai, agreeing to pay reparations and ceding Hong Kong to Britain as a colony. China was now safe for British drug traders. Unsurprisingly, when news of the outcome of the First Opium War reached London, it did not meet with universal celebration. In an editorial, The Times suggested that it ought to be Britain paying some reparation to China for a war ‘which could never have arisen had we not been guilty of this national crime’. Gladstone worried about the judgement God would pass on the nation. A change of government brought about a bizarre state of affairs when in January the following year Palmerston’s successor as foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, instructed Pottinger that the drug smugglers were to get no official protection. Pottinger shrugged his shoulders, passed on the information to Jardine, Matheson and the others and looked the other way.
Chinese resentment at the unfair conditions imposed by the Treaty of Nanking festered for decades,* and fourteen years later erupted into war again, after which the British carried on selling opium for the rest of the century. Periodically British statesmen wondered whether China as a whole might be added to the empire. It was decided that nothing much would be gained by taking on the responsibility – Britain was really interested only in the money to be made by trading with the country, and running India was quite enough of a headache already. ‘We have as much empire as the nation can carry,’ as the lofty Liberal Sir W. Vernon Harcourt put it in 1892. By then, the two taipans, Jardine and Matheson, were long dead, having returned to Britain and acquired Highland estates, seats in parliament and, in Matheson’s case, a baronetcy.*
As the anxieties expressed over the opium trade testify, the hard-faced capitalism which drove much imperial expansion was offset by an increasing sense that empire ought to be about some higher function. Many came genuinely to believe that the British could do good in the world. The conviction had been bolstered when the country at last tackled the injustice which lay behind much of its earlier wealth. For, fifty years earlier, the country had become the first European nation to abandon slavery. This bold act was to lay the foundations of the belief that building the British Empire had a higher moral purpose.
The enslavement of Africans had corrupted just about everything – almost the only section of British society which could be said to have entirely clean hands was the Society of Friends (the Quakers), whose experience of persecution made them more than willing to empathize with fellow human beings upon whom God’s light shone as readily as it did on white men. For the rest of late eighteenth-century Britain, from the customers of the coffeehouses to the king’s closest advisers, slavery was an ugly fact – conveniently distant. Among those who were obliged to think about the practice, a wilful blindness prevailed: as one member of parliament wrote, slavery was ‘not an amiable trade’, but ‘neither was the trade of a butcher an amiable trade, and yet a mutton chop was, nevertheless, a very good thing’. To be sure, there must have been some who shared Dr Johnson’s belief that no man is by nature the property of another. (He is said once to have raised his glass in Oxford and proposed a toast