§ Britain and France expanding their influence in China through the Opium Wars

• British colonies in India that grew and exported opium, and of the major naval base at Singapore through which British opium reached East Asia

• British officials had been frustrated by the trade deficit caused by the British demand for tea and the Qing refusal to facilitate the importation of any British product

  • • early 1700s a few European merchants and their Chinese partners were importing small quantities of opium

      • • 1729 -- the first Qing law banning opium imports was promulgated

    • 1800 -- opium smuggling had swelled the annual import level to as many as four thousand chests

    • early 1820s -- A price war stemming from competition between British and American importers raised demand so sharply that as many as thirty thousand chests were being imported by the 1830s

      • • The Qing emperor and his officials debated whether to legalize and tax opium or to enforce the existing ban more strictly

    • 1839 -- decided to root out the use and importation of opium and the Qing government sent a high official to Canton to deal with the matter

      • • Britain considered the ban on opium importation an intolerable limitation on trade, a direct threat to Britain’s economic health, and a cause for war.

Opium War (1839–1842)

• broke out when negotiations between the Qing official and British representatives reached a stalemate.

• 1839 -- British naval and marine forces arrived at the south China coast

• Qing defense forces:

  • • Bannermen -- the traditional, hereditary soldiers of the Qing Empire—were, like the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, hopelessly obsolete

    • Moving Qing reinforcements from central to eastern China took more than three months, and when the defense forces arrived, they were exhausted and basically without weapons

    • Bannermen used the few muskets the Qing had imported during the 1700s. The weapons were matchlocks, which required the soldiers to ignite the load of gunpowder in them by hand

      • • Most of the Bannermen, however, had no guns and fought with swords, knives, spears, and clubs

    • no imperial navy -- until they were able to engage the British in prolonged fighting on land, they were unable to defend themselves against British attacks.

    • The British could quickly transport their forces by sea along the coast; Qing troops moved primarily on foot

• British ships landed marines who pillaged coastal cities and then sailed to new destinations

  • • Soldiers under British command— many of them were Indians—carried percussion-cap rifles, which were far quicker, safer, and more accurate than the matchlocks

    • the long-range British artillery could be moved from place to place and proved deadly in the cities and villages of eastern China

    • British deployed new gunboats for shallow waters and moved without difficulty up the Yangzi River

• 1842 -- the terms of the Treaty of Nanking

  • • dismantled the old Canton system

    • The number of treaty ports—cities opened to foreign residents—increased from one (Canton) to five (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai)

    • the island of Hong Kong became a permanent British colony

    • extraterritorial rights -- British residents in China not subject to Chinese law

    • The Qing government agreed to set a low tariff of 5 percent on imports and to pay Britain an indemnity of 21 million ounces of silver as a penalty for having started the war

• A supplementary treaty the following year guaranteed most-favored-nation status to Britain; any privileges that China granted to another country would be automatically extended to Britain as well.

  • • This provision effectively prevented the colonization of China, because giving land to one country would have necessitated giving it to all

• 1860 a new treaty legalized their right to import opium.

• Later, French treaties established the rights of foreign missionaries to travel extensively in the Chinese countryside and preach their religion

  • • late 1800s -- France forced the court of Vietnam to end its vassalage to the Qing

      • • Britain encouraged Tibetan independence

• By 1900 -- number of treaty ports grew and numbered more than ninety

§ The construction of the Port of Buenos Aires with the support of British firms

modernization and expansion of port facilities at the Port of Buenos Aires

• • relied on British engineering firms, British banks, and British technology.

  • supported by Argentine economic interests most closely tied to the European export trade and by national political leaders who believed progress and prosperity required the imitation of European models.

  • British were the nation’s primary creditors as well as leaders in the development of the nation’s railroads, streetcar lines, and gas works in Buenos Aires.

  • work force was almost entirely recruited from recent immigrants

  • Positive:

    • • The new port facilities did facilitate a boom in exports and imports, and the huge public works budget did provide incomes for thousands of laborers

  • Negative:

    • • debts, design flaws, and the increased influence of foreign capital in Argentina left a legacy of problems that Argentina would be forced to deal with in the future

§ Cotton grown in South Asia and Egypt and exported to Great Britain and other European countries

Transition to an export economy

• British interests felled forests to make way for tea plantations, persuaded Indian farmers to grow cotton and jute for export

• exports were agricultural commodities for processing elsewhere: cotton fiber, opium, tea, silk, and sugar

• India imported manufactured goods from Britain, including the flood of machine-made cotton textiles that severely undercut Indian hand-loom weavers.

  • • effects on individual Indians varied enormously

      • • Some women found new jobs, though at very low pay, on plantations or in the growing cities, where prostitution flourished

        • Others struggled to hold families together or ran away from abusive husbands. Everywhere in India poverty remained the norm

British Raj infrastructure investments

• created great irrigation systems to alleviate the famines that periodically decimated whole provinces

• Indian Raj government (and BEIC before it) also promoted the introduction of new technologies into India not long after their appearance in Britain

  • • steamboats on the rivers and a massive program of canal building for irrigation

    • 1840s -- railroad boom (paid for out of government revenues) gave India its first national transportation network

      • • By 1870 -- India had the greatest rail network in Asia and the fifth largest in the world.

        • Originally designed to serve British commerce, the railroads were owned by British companies, constructed with British rails and equipment, and paid dividends to British investors

        • Ninety-nine percent of the railroad employees were Indians, but Europeans occupied all the top positions

        • some Indians opposed the railroads at first because the trains mixed people of different castes, faiths, and sexes

        • In 1870 over 18 million passengers traveled along the network’s 4,775 miles (7,685 kilometers) of track

        • By 1900 India’s trains were carrying 188 million passengers a year

    • followed shortly by telegraph lines

      • • By 1870 -- more than a half-million messages were sent up and down the 14,000 miles (22,500 kilometers) of telegraph wire.

    • 1867 -- installation of a new sewerage system in Calcutta

    • filtered water supply (1869) in Calcutta dramatically reduced cholera deaths there

      • • Similar measures in Bombay and Madras also led to great reductions, but most Indians lived in small villages where famine and lack of sanitation kept cholera deaths high.

        • In 1900 -- four out of every thousand residents of British India died of cholera

§ Palm oil produced in sub-Saharan Africa and exported to European countries

• thirty-six hundred Europeans tried to rule over an African population of more than nine million

  • • The combination of long distances and slow transport limited effective communication between regional authorities and officials in remote areas.

    • An inability to speak local languages and a limited understanding of local customs among European officials further undermined their effective administration

• Coerced labor

  • • all “natives” were legally obligated for “statute labor” of ten to twelve days a year, a practice that lasted through 1946.

    • unpaid labor on public projects, such as building railroads, constructing government buildings,and transporting goods

§ Copper extracted in Chile

• the mining companies of the late nineteenth century were heavily capitalized international corporations that could bully governments and buy political favors

• European and North American corporations owned most new mining enterprises in Latin America.

• New technology accelerated economic integration, but the high cost of this technology often increased dependence on foreign capital

  • • government promoted railroads by granting tax benefits, free land, and monopoly rights to both domestic and foreign investors

    • American owned copper companies came to dominate the Chilean economy

• open-pit copper mining in Chile scarred and polluted the environment

  • • Open mines dug to obtain ores lying close to the surface created a landscape of lunar craters, and runoff from the minerals poisoned the water for miles around.

    • Refineries that processed the ores fouled the environment with slag heaps and more toxic runoff

• 1870a -- Copper demand exploded with the rise of efficient generators that turned mechanical energy into electric current...electricity

• 1930s -- Copper deposits, found in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and the Belgian Congo, proved to be cheaper to mine than Chilean copper