Imperial Twilight

by Stephen R. Platt

  The East India Company directors mounted only a feeble resistance. They knew they faced daunting political odds: as soon as Earl Grey had assumed the prime ministership in 1830, the new president of the Board of Control, Charles Grant, informed the Company directors that as far as His Majesty’s Government was concerned, their China monopoly was done for. A long fight in Parliament stood ahead of them, but for a range of reasons they did not put up much of a struggle. For one thing, they feared losing governing control over India, a threat Grey dangled before them to keep them quiet about the China monopoly. It also did not hurt that they were promised a 10.5 percent dividend to help purchase their complacency. Their weakness was intensely frustrating to the current and former members of the Canton factory, who felt themselves being sold out by their superiors in London. “The Directors are labouring hard to expire with as much discredit as possible,” wrote one former factory chief to a colleague in Canton. “They will be humbugged by the Government, who will at length tell them they cannot resist the popular voice and they will throw them overboard like an old antiquated piece of machinery.”39

  The “popular voice” to which he referred was a crucial term at the time, for the debate over the Company’s charter renewal in the early 1830s was taking place in a very different political atmosphere than the previous one in 1813 had. A major change was under way that had nothing to do with China but everything to do with the power of the manufacturing districts: namely, the upheaval of the Great Reform Act, a bill to increase the number of democratically elected seats in the House of Commons, especially in the rapidly growing centers of industry like Birmingham and Manchester that previously had had no constituencies of their own in Parliament. To make room for the new seats, the bill eliminated a great number of “rotten” boroughs with miniscule populations whose seats had traditionally been allotted by patronage and purchase. Against a backdrop of public agitation that the aristocracy feared might turn into a revolution, and amid great rancor and opposition from politicians—entailing as it did the disenfranchisement of many serving members of Parliament—the bill was finally forced through the House of Commons by Earl Grey’s Whig party in 1832 on the heels of explosive public rioting in Bristol and elsewhere. Because the Reform Act would grant an unprecedented level of political power to the very industrial districts whose free-trade activists so fiercely opposed the Company’s monopoly in China, once it was passed the Company no longer really stood a chance.

  The East India Company still had George Staunton to defend it, though. Having served inconspicuously in the House of Commons since 1818, in 1830 Staunton was appointed to the committee investigating the East India Company’s affairs and served there as something of a champion of its interests. Though the transcripts of their hearings do not identify the questioners by name, it was almost certainly Staunton who kept pressing the questions of security and stability, who kept reiterating the Company’s role in keeping the corrupt and arbitrary local Chinese authorities in “check.” That was, at any rate, a constant refrain of his own writings.

  George Staunton’s survival in Parliament through the turmoil of the Reform Act shows him to have been at least moderately adept at politics. Though his first seat in the House of Commons was for a rotten borough whose votes he purchased outright (the first of two such boroughs that would return him), by 1831 he was nimble enough to sense the inevitability of the changes under way. At least he realized what was at stake: “The question now is not how we shall improve the reform of our Representation,” he wrote in his diary in the tumultuous fall of that year, “but how we shall prevent a Revolution.”40 Publicly, Staunton would eventually give his approval to the reform bill even though it meant eliminating his own seat. Any true support he felt for the cause, though, was purely abstract. Like many in such a position, he secretly resented it. “Although I always have and always shall disapprove of the entire Reform Bill,” he wrote in his diary on December 10, 1831, “thinking that it will on the whole do more harm than good, introduce or aggravate more abuses, than it will either remove or alleviate, I am by no means confident that I shall continue to resist it.”41 In deference to the political winds, he kept his misgivings to himself, and later, like many in his situation, he would claim to have supported the noble cause of parliamentary reform all along.

  With the passage of the reform legislation and the elimination of his previous seat, Staunton was forced to campaign for a democratic election for the first time in 1832 at the age of fifty-one, trying to gain a place in the new, reformed House of Commons. For the purposes of the campaign, he presented himself as a political independent, a “cordial” supporter of progressive Whig causes like the abolition of slavery (though quietly conservative in his stance on free trade). He insisted in campaign speeches that Britain’s foreign policy should be “essentially pacific,” though he hedged by adding that “no country can be secure in the enjoyment of peace, which is not also prepared to defend its rights and interests by war when necessary.”42 He said as little as possible about the East India Company and its charter.

  Given Staunton’s inexperience in the art of political persuasion, he was fortunate to be paired up for the election with a running mate whose ample charisma made up for his own shortcomings in that area: a well-connected liberal politician thirteen years his junior named Henry John Temple, best known as Lord Palmerston. Palmerston was a rising star of the Whig party with a splendid gift for effective (if “slipshod and untidy”) oratory who had served since 1830 as foreign secretary in Earl Grey’s government.43 Staunton and Palmerston campaigned together for the two seats for South Hampshire in the elections of December 1832 in a contest that took a more vicious turn than Staunton had expected. “I was perfectly astounded,” he later wrote, “by the virulence of the invectives with which I was assailed.” (Of those invectives, one of the most hurtful, after his lifetime of social awkwardness, was that Staunton was “unpopular.”) When the dust settled, though, Staunton and Palmerston won by a narrow margin.44

  From his position in the reformed House of Commons, newly dominated as it was by the champions of free trade, George Staunton saw himself as standing all but alone against a current of public opinion that threatened to sweep away the Company and its older, proven ways in China. But in the management of the Canton trade (as he, but few others, saw it) lay the future of Britain’s entire relationship with China, and Staunton considered himself personally responsible for the peaceful continuance of that relationship. For him, the Company represented order, stability, and dignity for the British in China. He was proud of having been part of the Canton factory for so long, from his early days arguing in a Chinese court to his leading role in convincing Lord Amherst to uphold Britain’s dignity by refusing to kowtow. He feared what might happen if that force of tradition and stability should be removed.

  Finding himself the vanguard of a cause that many considered to be lost, Staunton came to regret his shy nature and unconventional upbringing: his homeschooling, his lack of Cambridge or Oxford polish, his childhood with no friends other than his father and mother, all of his years as a wallflower in the Canton factory. They did not serve him well in the House of Commons. “Neither my habits nor my education,” he admitted, “had well qualified me for the warfare of public discussion.”45 Although he commanded respect for his knowledge about China he was not, by any means, a compelling speaker.

  In the spring of 1833, as the vote to terminate the Company’s monopoly loomed, George Staunton swallowed his anxieties and moved a series of China-related resolutions in the House of Commons that he insisted would be necessary to ensuring a peaceful transition from monopoly to free trade in Canton. The foundation of those resolutions was Staunton’s strong belief that the only thing that had ensured peace in the China trade over his lifetime had been the unity of the Company and its great familiarity and experience dealing with what he termed the “arbitrary,” “oppressive,” and “corrupt” agents of Chinese government at Canton.

 
Staunton feared the results of a free-for-all, where British traders who had no experience dealing with the Chinese would suddenly show up and get themselves into trouble at Canton, with no organized body to represent them or negotiate on their behalf. And so in his resolutions he proposed that the Company’s role as mediator between the British and Chinese should only be allowed to lapse if a treaty could first be agreed upon with the Chinese authorities, one that would allow for a British government diplomat to be stationed in Canton to supervise the British community and represent its interests. Only then, he believed, could the trade go forward without a strong likelihood of the competing free traders provoking conflict or even a war with the Chinese.

  Staunton tried repeatedly to bring his resolutions before the House of Commons for a debate. Twice he was scheduled to introduce them, but on both occasions he had to give up his allotted time to more pressing matters of national business (disappointing the Times, which considered Staunton’s resolutions to be “well worthy of a distinct discussion”).46 Finally, on June 4, 1833, he got his chance. Nervously, he stood from his bench to deliver a lengthy prepared speech making the case for his resolutions. It was the first time that British relations with China had ever come before Parliament as a distinct question, he observed; for two hundred years, all responsibility for the relationship had been with the East India Company rather than the government. Apologizing for his lack of speaking ability, he assured the members present that he was nevertheless uniquely qualified to judge the situation in China. He reminded them of his long experience in commerce at Canton, his participation in both of Great Britain’s embassies to Beijing, his ability to speak and read Chinese. Those experiences, he insisted, “have afforded me opportunities of information respecting that singular government and people, such as have probably fallen to the lot of no other European.”47

  In a shy voice that was unfortunately too quiet even for the reporters in the gallery above to make out much of what he was saying, Staunton tried to convince his listeners that any change to the trade in Canton would have to be gradual rather than sudden, and it would have to involve negotiations with the Chinese. Even if the monopoly were terminated, he argued, the Company’s dominant role must be prolonged afterward as long as necessary to mediate between its own employees, the free traders, and the Chinese government. “It could not be expected,” he said of the Company men and free traders, “that these conflicting parties would long live in harmony, nor could it be expected that either of them should be able to inspire the local authorities in China with respect, unless some higher power—some public representative were sent there to control both parties.”48

  As Staunton mumbled through his speech, pausing along the way to read aloud from a series of supporting documents, the less than captivated audience, already thin, was filtering out of the chamber. He was midway through an argument about how the presence of the Company kept the local Chinese authorities in check when he was interrupted. Someone motioned for a head count. Of the more than 650 members of the House of Commons who might have chosen to sit and listen to Staunton’s speech that afternoon, there were not even forty left in the chamber—not enough to vote on his cherished resolutions—so the session abruptly ended. Staunton’s carefully prepared speech was cut off mid-paragraph, never to be finished. Even for a man well acquainted with social embarrassment, he had never been so humiliated in his entire life.

  Nevertheless, a sense of desperate urgency drove Staunton to fight through his humiliation and try one last time to get his resolutions adopted, by proposing them shortly afterward as a last-minute amendment to the bill on the East India Company’s charter. They were immediately struck down without a vote. Charles Grant, the president of the Board of Control who was so antagonistic to the China monopoly, took issue with Staunton’s faith that the East India Company supercargoes were the most capable representatives of the British in China. Actually, said Grant (in reference to events like those that had just transpired over the women and the shrubbery), the role of the Company supercargoes “was ambiguous and embarrassing, and occasionally, very invidious.” Grant acknowledged Staunton’s worries about the potential for future conflict between the British merchants and the Chinese authorities, but he said that was yet another reason why the monopoly must be abolished. The China trade was so important to Great Britain, Grant said, that “the exclusive privileges of carrying [it] on . . . ought not to be confined to one body of men.”49 Staunton’s resolutions died a quiet legislative death, and the great momentum for opening Canton to free trade—without limitations—surged forward.

  In the autumn of 1833, news reached Canton that the East India Company’s monopoly would not be renewed when its charter expired the following May. Not only would the Company cease to control the British traders at Canton, but according to the early intelligence William Jardine received—which turned out to be correct—it would no longer even be allowed by the British government to continue trading in China at all.50 Come the spring of 1834, the East India Company that had dominated trade for more than a century in Canton would, for all intents and purposes, vanish.

  CHAPTER 10

  A Darkening Turn

  The final days of the East India Company’s factory were an anxious time in Canton. For all the excitement of British investors preparing to leap into the newly opened China trade for the first time, those who had been in Canton for the long term were wary of the coming changes. Robert Morrison, for one, faced the fact that he would no longer have a job once the factory was dissolved. “Canton is greatly agitated by the new system. Hopes and fears alternate,” he wrote in January 1834 to George Staunton, who had helped him find his footing in Canton back in 1807 when the Company still wanted to keep him out. The end of the monopoly, said Morrison, was “little short of a death-blow” to himself and the others who had made their careers in the British factory. He had read Staunton’s speech from the House of Commons, the abortive one calling for a more gradual opening of the Canton trade, so he knew his old friend would sympathize when he said he worried about troubles that lay on the horizon—not so much for trade as for China itself. “How few,” he told Staunton sadly, “consider the welfare of China in all their speculations about free trade.”1

  The Hong merchants were apprehensive as well. Though the East India Company was losing its monopoly on the British side, they would of course continue to hold theirs on the Chinese side, and it was unclear how the trade would function. “I fear we shall be overwhelmed with British goods of every description on the opening of the trades,” wrote Houqua to John Murray Forbes, voicing the concern of many that the end of the monopoly would result in a hopelessly glutted market as British newcomers poured in without any rational control. Forbes was home in Boston at the time, where he would get married before returning to Canton and his duties at Russell & Co. later in the year. Houqua said he missed him and hoped for his safe return to China as soon as possible. “I shall be satisfied to see you here next season,” he wrote, “when there may be something left for us to speculate upon, although the opening of the trade will be of no service to our operations.”2

  The country traders, heavily involved in opium as they were, had separate concerns. They welcomed the opening of legal trade between Canton and Britain (indeed, the very first private cargo of tea from China to London would go out under Jardine’s name), but since the smuggling side of their operations had always been free of the East India Company’s monopoly, the new era did not promise any new advantages. Rather, they braced themselves for a wave of Johnny-come-latelies who, to help support their entrance into the tea-for-textiles commerce at Canton, would surely try to muscle in on the opium trade at Lintin as well.

  But Jardine and Matheson had been planning for this contingency for years. To circumvent the periodic gluts of opium at Canton that would only worsen under increased competition, they had been trying to find a way to do what their competitors could not: to get information, and opium, from India to China faster—a
nd, if possible, to get it there in the off-season, against the yearly monsoon that had dictated the timetable of maritime commerce at Canton since the invention of sail. Toward that end they had tried chartering a steamship in 1829, the first to appear in East Asia, to carry a load of opium from Calcutta to Lintin for them. The experiment failed (it ran out of coal on the way), but in 1833 Jardine and Matheson invested in a special clipper called the Red Rover—small and narrow, with tall, that could beat so close to the wind it could make the passage from Calcutta to Canton against even the raked masts and wide spars—heaviest monsoon winds when conventional ships were grounded for the season. It would be the first of many, inaugurating the age of the “opium clipper,” a unique vessel with an intensely specific purpose that would dominate the India-China opium trade for more than two decades to come.3

  It was one thing to dominate the market at Lintin, but the holy grail, so to speak, was to find new markets entirely, up the coast and untouched by their competitors. To do that, a firm needed a ship with a captain willing to risk capture or attack by Chinese coastal forces, and—even more rare and valuable—it needed a Chinese interpreter willing to come along for the journey and negotiate the sale of the cargo. The most aggressive of the opium traders in Canton thus took a very keen interest in the missionary Karl Gutzlaff after his return in December 1831 from his secret journey up to Tianjin. He had proven that a voyage up the coast by a westerner without Chinese permission could be pulled off. Or at least, he had shown that he could pull it off—for there was only one Karl Gutzlaff.