Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Lord William Bentinck was the governor-general (1828–35) keenest to impose this Utilitarian, Anglicist orthodoxy on Bengal. Like Cornwallis, he abjured the flummery of Wellesley and, with it, any hint of orientalist sympathy. Bentinck dictated the sole use of English in legal and bureaucratic procedures, starved the Asiatick Society of funds and drove the Calcutta Madrasa and Sanskrit College almost towards extinction. The closed minds and cultural arrogance of the British Empire in India were beginning to crystallize, even in multicultural Calcutta. It was exactly what the ‘orientalist’ governor of Madras, Sir Thomas Munro, had feared might happen. ‘The ruling vice of our Government is innovation,’ he complained. In a letter to the former foreign secretary George Canning in 1821, he said: ‘I fear some downright Englishman [at the India Board] … will insist on making Anglo-Saxons of the Hindoos’. The truth was that ‘the improvement of the character of a people, and the keeping them, at the same time, in the lowest state of dependence on foreign rulers to which they can be reduced by conquest, are matters quite incompatible with each other’.92

  In Bengal, there was a more pressing fear that the best days of Calcutta were already behind it. The 1830 bankruptcy of John Palmer & Co. – the wealthiest and most reliable of Calcutta’s agency houses, which had dominated the city’s commercial life for forty years – on the back of a crisis in the indigo market, prompted financial contagion across all the major trading houses.93 ‘It ruined one half of the English society in Bengal and seriously injured the other half,’ wrote Macaulay from Calcutta in 1836. ‘A large proportion of the most important functionaries here are deeply in debt and, accordingly, the mode of living is now exceedingly quiet and modest. Those immense subscriptions, those public tables, those costly entertainments and equipages of which [Bishop] Heber and others who saw Calcutta a few years back, say so much, are never heard of.’94 The fabled City of Palaces was starting on its long journey towards Rudyard Kipling’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’, where ‘death looked down’. From mid-century, the language of Calcutta shifted quite perceptibly: talk of the beauty, sophistication and majesty of the ‘Second City of Empire’ gave way to concerns about public health, dirt, disease and squalor. The amorphous stench of the city became a permanent source of British conversation. Kipling called it the Big Calcutta Stink, or B.C.S.

  There is only one. Benares is fouler in point of concentrated, pent-up muck, and there are local stenches in Peshawar which are stronger than the B.C.S.; but, for diffused, soul-sickening expansiveness, the reek of Calcutta beats both Benares and Peshawar. Bombay cloaks her stenches with a veneer of assafœtida and tobacco; Calcutta is above pretence. There is no tracing back the Calcutta plague to any one source. It is faint, it is sickly, and it is indescribable.95

  The sense of decline was more than just environmental as the economic strength of Calcutta was challenged by other Indian cities more attuned to the industrial age. The illusion of permanence, of that imperial bravado which inspired a cityscape of neo-classical follies, was ebbing.96

  What was certainly true was that the profits of the East India Company, whose agent Job Charnock had founded British Calcutta in 1690, had come to a precipitous end in Bengal and in 1833 its monopoly was finally annulled by the British government. Calcutta’s hinterland had been stripped of its riches, and the British industrial revolution and rapid expansion of the Lancashire cotton industry undermined any profitable export industry from Bengal. India was now forced to import finished goods from Manchester, and the Company’s income shrivelled. Abandoning its exhausted playground of Calcutta and hungry for new profits, British merchants now headed east out of the Bay of Bengal towards the Middle Kingdom of Qing China, to found the most potent city of free enterprise in the history of British imperialism.

  6

  Hong Kong

  ‘A free port on British soil in China’

  Holed up in the Portuguese trading enclave of Macao, the Scottish merchant James Matheson seemed to possess an uncanny ability to predict British policy in the East. ‘Hong Kong is to be immediately occupied by our forces, and till Her Majesty’s pleasure is known, will be garrisoned by about a thousand Europeans,’ he wrote back to his business partner, William Jardine, in London. Thankfully, there would be no objection from the Royal Navy ‘to our stowing opium there’.1

  As Matheson predicted, on 26 January 1841 Her Majesty’s ship Sulphur circumnavigated the island of Hong Kong and then landed at fifteen minutes past eight in the morning – ‘and being the bona fide first possessors, her Majesty’s health was drank with three cheers on Possession Mount’. The same day, the full British squadron arrived. ‘The marines were landed, the union [flag] hoisted on our post, and formal possession taken of the island, by Commodore Sir J. G. Bremer, accompanied by other officers of the squadron, under a feu-de-joie from the marines, and a royal salute from the ships of war.’2 Watching proceedings, bobbing in the choppy South China Sea, was Matheson himself. ‘I witnessed the hoisting of the British flag at Hong Kong this 26th,’ he reported back to Jardine.3

  The British were not, in fact, the ‘bona fide first possessors’: an indigenous Chinese population existed on the island numbering up to 4,000 by the time the Sulphur dropped anchor. For centuries, they had been engaged in a subsistence economy of farming, fishing and stone-cutting in the shadow of the great trading hubs of Canton and Portuguese Macao across the Pearl River Delta. And so the arrival of Bremer’s squadron in the stunning, rocky setting of Hong Kong, or the ‘Fragrant Harbour’ as it was known in Cantonese, set in train the long, often discordant history of Sino-British involvement in building one of the most celebrated imperial cities in the world. It grew as a monument to an idea – free trade – as well as the less exalted colonial realities behind that nominally pacific ambition. In its port-and-peak natural beauty, its urban density and deep harbour, as well as its complex relationship with the mainland, Hong Kong would be a resplendent if uneasy monument to the global reach of the British Empire and to British imperialism at the height of its ideological self-confidence. Over the succeeding 150 years, this extraordinary city-state would also come subtly to reflect the shifting realities of world politics.

  Today that means a declining West and a rising East – all readily traceable through the prism of Hong Kong’s governance, from the contentious 1997 UK handover to the conclusive sealing of China’s hegemony with the 2012 election of the pro-Beijing chief executive of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying. Yet, for all the centuries of geo-political struggle over this piece of East Asian real estate, there has remained one constant. As Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Emily Lau put it in 1997, ‘Like many other governments, London’s top priority is getting a slice of the huge China market. We have also not forgotten that trade was the reason why the colony of Hong Kong was founded in the nineteenth century.’ 4 She was right. The British capture of Hong Kong symbolized a rejection of the East India Company, the mercantilism of Calcutta and the territorial vanity of the Marquis of Wellesley. Instead, the creation of a new city on a rocky outpost on the edges of the Pearl River would exemplify the energy of laissez-faire and the prowess of Britain’s ‘informal empire’ of free trade. The history of Hong Kong reveals how the promotion of Britain’s colonial interests worked hand in glove with a high-minded belief in the benefits of extending global commerce. Then, as now, whether it was aboard Her Majesty’s ship Sulphur in 1841 or at the gathering of the Hong Kong association at the Mandarin Oriental in 2010, the port city would serve as an entry-point for British business into the vast riches of an untapped Chinese market – the only difference being that back then Hong Kong was ‘ours’, and now it is ‘theirs’.

  THE ACCURSED AND PROHIBITED POISON

  Looking round modern Victoria today it is curious to reflect that the men who founded the prosperity of this mundane granite citadel … first made their money by the sale of that most intangible of all commodities – illusion: for the opium trade, we may infer, provides the only example in mercantile history
of massive and prosaic fortunes being made by selling the material for hallucination and artificially induced happiness.5

  With typical insouciance, James Pope-Hennessy highlighted how the riches of harsh, rocky Hong Kong were erected on the whispery puffs of opium and that the Gospel of Free Trade had some truly fallen apostles. As Hong Kong vice consul Henry Sirr put it in the 1840s, opium was ‘China’s curse’.

  By the sale of this pernicious drug Great Britain’s sons gain gold; and earn opprobrium for dealing destruction around them, bringing into derision the name of a Christian country, by enabling the Chinese to violate the laws of their own nation, in obtaining the accursed and prohibited poison; the use of which entails destruction, mentally and bodily on its infatuated devotees.6

  Some of the earliest accounts of the modern opium industry can be traced to the Dutch East Indies in the 1690s, when the VOC sold opium in Sumatra for an expanding drug market across the archipelago. It was, however, indigenous Chinese junk traders who were the first to bring opium on to the mainland and build up a demand for the drug in elite circles. This led in 1729 to an import ban into China by the Qing Empire except under licence for medical purposes.7 To eliminate any uncertainty, the smoking of opium was outlawed in 1796, and the importation block reasserted in 1800. None of these clear, legal prohibitions stopped the British East India Company from entering the market. The Company had gained its first foothold in China in 1672, taking the place of the expelled Dutch VOC with a trading post in Taiwan. By the early 1700s it had built up a prosperous trading operation – working alongside the Hong merchants licensed to deal with foreign merchants – centred on its ‘factory’ at Canton. Indeed, the finances of Leadenhall Street were becoming increasingly oriented around the opium trade in the East Indies. Heavily dependent upon exporting tea from China into Europe, the Company discovered that the merchants of Shanghai had little interest in buying British produce in return. There were no reciprocal orders for Manchester cottons or Staffordshire pottery or Yorkshire woollens; the only currency the Chinese merchants, the Co-Hongs, were interested in was bullion – and the relentless drain of silver west to east was soon threatening to scupper the Company finances. It was among the poppy fields of Bengal that a solution was found to this fiscal crisis. ‘Opium is the only ready money article sold in China,’ as William Jardine succinctly put it.

  From the early 1780s, Warren Hastings was already smuggling opium into China, and by the turn of the century it had become a core component of the East India Company’s business. The opium was grown under Company monopoly in Bengal, sold at public auctions run by Company officials and branded with the Company’s unique chop mark on each chest; its sales provided the Company with some 15 per cent of its tax revenue in India. Wary of provoking the Chinese authorities and risking any long-term damage to Sino-British trade, Leadenhall Street refused to allow Company ships directly to transport the cargo out of Calcutta. Instead, private merchants, known as ‘country traders’, were licensed to carry the chests laden with opium cakes into Canton, whereupon Chinese smugglers took the drug up country. With such extensive corporate resources behind it, the spread of opium into China ‘crept in a most mysterious and fascinating manner into the homes of the rich and poor, and with its mystic fingers gripped the hearts of old and young’, reported one shamed British missionary. ‘Men became paralysed before this new force, and reason stood silent, and the highest ideals of human life slowly paled and vanished in the presence of this Indian mystery.’8 However lamentable the effects, the profits were unanswerable. Chinese drug smugglers converted their cash payments into East India Company bills payable in London or Calcutta, and the flow of silver from west to east began to reverse its direction at a remarkable speed. Leadenhall Street’s balance of payments crisis faded thanks to another ‘triangle trade’ – this time an Asian nexus that saw the produce of Indian poppy fields arrive in City of London accounts via Canton agency houses.

  With such massive profits on offer, the East India Company monopoly over trade with China was soon under pressure from aggressive pirate traders. British merchants started to seek out alternative sources of opium, and in princely Malwa, on the west coast of central India, they found a new fount of poppy production beyond the control of the British army or Company officials. From the 1810s Malwa opium started to enter the Chinese market, forcing the East India Company to slash the price of its own Bengal opium and leading to a surge of imports into Canton. From 5,000 chests in 1820, the East India Company was exporting over 19,000 chests by 1831. Leading the customs-busting operation was Jardine Matheson, which poured money into a new fleet of clipper ships to outmanoeuvre the competition (the Red Rover could race from the Hooghly to the Pearl River and back again in eighty-six days, with its company flag of a white diagonal cross on a blue field billowing through the South China Sea) as well as brigs and schooners to offload the drug along the China coast. Its efficient distribution infrastructure meant that by the late 1820s Jardine, Matheson & Co. was able to control up to a third of Canton opium deliveries. The firm was wholly unembarrassed about the basis of its prosperity: William Jardine thought the opium trade ‘the safest and most gentlemanlike speculation I am aware of’,9 and James Matheson declared that ‘During the twenty one years I have passed almost entirely in China, I can conscientiously declare that I have never seen a native in the least bestialized by opium smoking, like drunkards in Europe.’ Jardine Matheson’s only frustration was the unhelpful attitude of the Chinese authorities and, in the absence of a safe port in which to offload the cargo, the dangerous necessity for clippers to dock alongside floating warehouses. How much easier it would be if the British could get their hands on a nice, proper harbour – such as, for example, Hong Kong. Indeed, James Matheson’s nephew, Alexander Matheson, came to think the island ‘absolutely indispensable for the extension of British trade in China’ and, in 1842, wanted it ‘officially declared a British Colony with as little delay as possible’.10

  A busy drying room in the opium factory in Patna, India. The raw opium was formed into a ball about 1½ kilos in weight and wrapped in poppy petals to protect it from damage. The balls were then dried on shelves and boxed into chests each containing 25–40 balls before shipping to China and Europe. After W. S. Sherwill, lithograph (c. 1850).

  But Hong Kong was never the ultimate objective; it was a way-station for the real prize of China. With a conviction that bordered on obsession, Europe was determined to ‘open up’ China to the wonders of modern, capital markets. ‘The trade with China already is of equal if not greater importance than that with any other nation in the world, and, if judiciously fostered and encouraged, is capable of almost unlimited increase,’ wrote the former East India Company merchant H. Hamilton Lindsay in an open letter to Viscount Palmerston in 1836.11 British merchants and diplomats remained bewildered as to why the Qing Empire could possibly want to preclude itself from the wonders of Western civilization and commodity capitalism.

  In fact, attempts to open China up to European imports had been going on since the ill-fated mission of the first British ambassador to China (and first ambassador to the Cape Colony), Lord George Macartney, in 1793–4. Despatched by Henry Dundas to seek some form of diplomatic representation at the Celestial Court in Peking and reveal to the Qing dynasty the virtues of the ‘fair competition of the Market’, the Macartney mission ended in one of the great fiascos of British diplomatic history as its leader was repeatedly humiliated and then expelled. ‘Strange and costly objects do not interest me,’ was the emperor’s high-handed response to King George III. ‘As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things.’ The lofty, Confucian ethos of the Qing court never had much admiration for the solid manufactures of Britain’s industrial revolution. Yet the mission was not a total waste of time. From a military perspective, Lord Macartney realized that ‘the empire of China is an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War … She may, perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift sometime as a wreck, and will then be
dashed to pieces on the shores.’12

  But to James Matheson’s mind, it was positively wicked that the ‘empire of China’ could control such a ‘vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth’ and not allow foreigners access to them. Instead, they selfishly wanted to ‘monopolize all the advantages of their situation’ and retain the domestic market for themselves.13 It was all the more egregious since, according to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and Manufacturers, ‘no country presents to us the basis of a more legitimate and mutually advantageous trade than China’.14 Its vast numbers and advanced urban centres but backward state of industrial production made the Middle Kingdom a tantalizing prospect for British manufacturers and merchants. What was more, it could be an important export market for India, the profits from which could then be spent on more imports from Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham to Calcutta and Madras.