Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Legitimizing this commercial strategy for ‘China Opened’ was the Gospel of Free Trade – that self-righteous engine of nineteenth-century British imperialism. As the free-market ideas of Adam Smith and Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham seeped through the British ruling class, the corrupt practices of the East India Company were condemned as an out-of-date, Hanoverian hangover. The Manchester School of Political Economy, with its Trinity of competition, transparency and open markets – the aspiration of Jardine and Matheson – started to reframe colonial thinking. In 1823 the President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson, introduced the Reciprocity of Duties Bill into parliament in an attempt to dismantle, as he put it, ‘the bastions of our ancient colonial system’: mercantilism gave way to open markets as Huskisson pursued a series of free-trade agreements with other trading nations, effectively ending the 200-year sway of the Navigation Acts. In 1833 the East India Company’s monopoly was abolished by Act of Parliament, opening up the Empire to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. In 1846 the Corn Laws would be repealed as a defining symbol of the abandonment of the protectionist past and the triumph of Manchester liberalism; in 1860, with the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty, even France and Britain would agree to a free-trade pact. ‘The spirit which moved the British Parliament to wrench asunder the shackles in which British trade had been kept for two long centuries by the East India Company was the potent spirit of free trade,’ explained the Hong Kong missionary Ernst Johann Eitel at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘and in this general free trade movement we see above the dark horizon the first streak of light heralding the advent of the future free port of Hong Kong.’15

  But before Hong Kong came Singapore – the first of those rays of light dispelling the mercantilist gloom from the British Empire. In 1819 the East India Company writer Stamford Raffles began negotiations with Sultan Hussein Shah to secure the island, which was located in a prime position on the trading route between India and China. Sat between the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago, Singapore was historically part of the Dutch sphere of influence. Raffles’s achievement was to snatch it from under their nose in 1824, declare it a British possession and then institute a new model of colonialism predicated on the virtuous effects of free trade. ‘It is the peculiar characteristic of Great Britain, that wherever her influence has been extended, it has carried civilization and improvement in its train,’ he wrote in 1819. ‘The acquisitions of Great Britain in the East have not been made in the spirit of conquest.’16 Rather, in the spirit of raising the wealth of all nations, the Port of Singapore was declared ‘a Free Port and the Trade thereof is open to Ships and Vessels of every Nation free of duty equally and alike to all’. The consequences were immediate as the traffic from China, Siam and Cochinchina – as well as German, Swiss, Dutch, Portuguese and British ships – began to pour into Singapore. In 1822, a total of 139 square-rigged vessels entered the port; by 1834, there were 517 ships carrying nearly 160,000 tons of cargo coming in.

  Despite all the evidence of port tonnage and shared prosperity, there still remained certain civilizations unpersuaded of the merits of open markets. Nowhere was this obstinacy more apparent than in the major Chinese port of Canton, where foreign merchants were required to conduct all trade through a laborious cartel of Hong merchants. Added to this were the costs of compradors and linguists and then port charges and an ever-expanding array of other taxes the Canton governor wanted to add on. In 1827, James Matheson, who had ordered the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo to be sent out to him in China, attempted to change the culture with a weekly paper, the Canton Register, in order to ‘disseminate the principles of free trade’.17 The paper even ran a £50 essay prize for any author able to illustrate ‘the great principles of Political Economy, applicable to the errors and abuses which may exist in China’.

  These were principles shared by the Scottish naval officer and veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar Lord Napier. Despatched to China as lord superintendent of trade in the aftermath of the abolition of the East India Company monopoly in 1833, he adopted an even more pugilistic approach than Matheson – confident that ‘three or four frigates or brigs’ and ‘a few steady British troops’ could settle things ‘in a space of time inconceivably short’.18 This would, he thought, speedily ensure British objectives of a resident embassy in Peking and open access to China’s ports for London merchants. Despite clear instructions from Whitehall to ‘observe all possible moderation’ and ‘conform to the law and usages of China’ in pursuing the strategy, the old sea-dog sailed into Canton without approval, sent gunboats upriver to Whampoa, and paid absolutely no heed to Celestial protocol. This was to be free trade delivered from the barrel of a gun.*

  In the event, Napier’s ambitions were cut short when he contacted malarial fever and died at Macao in 1834. But he did not depart without planting in the mind of the Foreign Office a recommendation to occupy ‘the island of Hong Kong, in the entrance of the Canton river, which is admirably adapted for every purpose’. As demands for the opening-up of China to Western commerce intensified and the profiteering of the opium merchants accelerated, the allure of the Fragrant Harbour grew stronger. ‘If the lion’s paw is to be put down on any part of the south side of China let it be Hong Kong,’ wrote one correspondent in 1836 to James Matheson’s Canton Register, ‘let the lion declare it to be under his guarantee a free port, and in ten years it will be the most considerable mart east of the Cape!’19

  GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY

  ‘This little band of free traders, the Jardines, the Mathesons, the Dents, the Gibbs, the Turners, the Hollidays, the Braines, the Innes, unconsciously did for the future colony of Hong Kong what subsequently Cobden did for Manchester,’ was how E. J. Eitel described the commercial transformation of the mid-nineteenth century. They ‘prepared the public mind for future free trade in a free port on British soil in China’.20

  Leading the pack were Messrs Jardine and Matheson, the outriders of British imperialism in the East. Born in Dumfriesshire in 1784 to a family of small farmholders, William Jardine was educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh before securing a position with the East India Company as a surgeon’s mate. He travelled back and forth to India and then China using his ‘privilege tonnage’ as a ship’s surgeon for cargo space for private trade, mostly in cassia, cochineal and musk. His interest in commerce soon supplanted that in medicine, and in 1817 he resigned his commission with the East India Company and became an independent country trader, working the Bombay to Canton route. And it was in Bombay in 1820 that he met a fellow Scot, James Matheson, then making his way in the export trade.

  Twelve years younger than Jardine, Matheson was also a graduate of Edinburgh University and the East India Company. Various business ventures came and went until he based himself in Canton and Macau in the early 1820s and started earning proper money as an agent for merchants in Singapore and India. However, it was Jardine who transformed his prospects by bringing him into his trading company of Magniac & Co., which in 1834 was reconstituted as Jardine, Matheson & Co. Matheson was the more mercurial, entrepreneurial and intellectual of the two, but it was the brutish, Calvinist, austere Jardine who ground out the profits from their Canton factory at No. 4, The Creek. All time was God’s time, and Jardine abhorred idleness; he kept only one chair in his office, on which he sat while visitors stood. Among the Chinese he was known as the ‘Iron-Headed Rat’, after an incident at Canton when he was struck on the head by a club and carried on as normal. Benjamin Disraeli, in his 1845 novel Sybil, offered a more acerbic pen-portrait after Jardine had returned from China and stood as Member of Parliament for Ashburton in Devon. ‘A Scotchman, richer than Croesus, one McDruggy, fresh from Canton, with a million of opium in each pocket, denouncing corruption and bellowing free trade.’21

  There was a third figure in the establishment of Jardine, Matheson & Co. – the Bombay-based Parsi merchant Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. Born in 1783, Jejeebhoy worked his apprenticeship in his uncle’s sh
op counting and selling empty bottles before joining the China trade as an accounts clerk for another Parsi merchant. On one journey in 1805, aboard the Brunswick (which would later be captured by French forces) he made friends with the ship’s assistant surgeon, William Jardine, and was happy to enter into the opium business with him and Matheson. Jejeebhoy’s supply routes out of Bombay and extensive trading contacts in Calcutta, Colombo, Singapore and Macao helped the two Scottish entrepreneurs build up the lucrative trade between Britain, India and China. They bought opium from Jejeebhoy or at auction in Calcutta, shipped it into Canton, sold it to the ‘country traders’ and then purchased Company bills, with the profits cashed back in London. The end of the East India Company monopoly in 1833 provided further opportunities for the firm in tea, silk, cotton, even insurance. But the opium trade remained at the core of their business, with chests of Malwa and Patna buying Jardine and Matheson country seats and securing the company its soubriquet, ‘the Princely Hong’.

  If Jardine and Matheson were admired in London as the buccaneering heroes of British free enterprise, the view from Peking was less adulatory. The criminality, drug addiction and sustained loss of silver bullion wrought by Jardine, Matheson & Co. were threatening to destabilize regional economies and undermine the finances of the Qing Empire. Despite repeated edicts outlawing the import of opium, British merchants had taken no notice. After debating the merits of legalizing the drug, Peking decided instead on a clampdown and appointed the experienced Qing official Lin Zexu as imperial commissioner in Canton with a licence to eradicate the problem. He first fired off a letter to Queen Victoria complaining of opium being planted ‘from hill to hill’ in British India, where ‘its obnoxious odor ascends, irritating heaven and frightening the spirits’. He then announced that if ‘the barbarian merchants of your country’ wished to carry on doing business in China, they would be required ‘to obey our statutes respectfully and to cut off permanently the source of opium’. Lin then rounded up the Chinese smugglers, confiscated 20,000 cases of British-owned opium and confined foreign merchants in their factories until all his requests were acceded to. This was just the kind of casus belli the China free-traders had been hoping for.22

  In London, William Jardine raced round Whitehall to meet the foreign secretary, the roué Whig Lord Palmerston, to urge an overwhelming military and naval response to Lin Zexu’s hostage-taking. ‘My advice is to send a naval force to blockade the Chinese coast from the Tartar Wall [Great Wall] to Tienpack; the force to consist of two ships of the line, two frigates and two flat-bottomed steamers for river service with a sufficient number of transports to carry … six or seven thousand men.’ The troops needed to head straight to Peking to demand an apology for the insult, ‘payment for the opium given up, an equitable commercial treaty and liberty to trade with northern ports’.23 In a further note to Palmerston, this plan of action became more succinct: ‘You take my opium – I take your Islands in return – we are therefore Quits – and thenceforth if you please let us live in friendly Communion and good fellowship.’24 Palmerston rarely needed much encouragement for a display of British imperial bravado, and the iron warship Nemesis, armed with rocket launchers and 32-pounder guns, soon left Portsmouth harbour for the Pearl River, and an expeditionary force set sail from India (carried, conveniently enough, by a Jardine Matheson clipper). With tensions rising, the British merchant community fled Canton for Macao and then the secure inlet of Hong Kong. As they departed, a Royal Navy force of sixteen men-of-war, four armed steamers and twenty-seven transport ships carrying 3,000 British troops arrived to avenge the Lin Zexu insult and prise open China once and for all.

  As predicted, Macartney’s ‘old, crazy, first-rate Man of War’ was dashed to pieces as British naval might smashed through the Qing defences. Sir Edward Belcher, now on the Nemesis, recorded the scene as the steam-powered battleship drew up close to the Chinese junks ‘before opening fire’ with ‘several well-directed guns’, throwing the Qing navy into confusion.

  The first rocket pitched into the magazine of the ship next to the admiral, and she blew up in great style … The boats then moved on, and set fire to the junks in the lower part of the river, but in ascending the main branch, those retreating under canvass kept up a very spirited fire on the chasing boats … The increase of force soon decided their fate; two ran on shore, and the remainder made their escape.25

  Some of the naval encounters lasted barely an hour. The British battle-fleet cruised on to capture Amoy (Xiamen), Chushan, Chintu (Chengdu) and Ningpo (Ningbo). In the spring of 1842 Shanghai itself was taken; then the flotilla entered the lower Yangtze River with a view to storming Nanking (Nanjing) and cutting off supplies to Peking by controlling access to the Grand Canal.

  An initial attempt at peace – the Chuan-pi Convention in January 1841 – drawn up by Chinese and British officials was dismissed by both Peking and London as a piece of diplomatic freelancing and an unacceptable, near-treacherous compromise. The British negotiator, Captain Charles Elliot, had secured a $6 million indemnity, new terms of equality between British and Chinese merchants and a set of useful if unspecified rights over the island of Hong Kong – just enough to allow Sir J. G. Bremer and his troops to hoist the Union flag at Possession Mount. In London, however, Lord Palmerston was incandescent at the pusillanimity of it all. ‘Throughout the whole course of your proceedings, you seemed to have considered that my instructions were waste paper,’ he harangued Elliot. Nor was he very impressed with the prize of Hong Kong – ‘a barren little island with hardly a house upon it’.26 Queen Victoria was equally disappointed. ‘All we wanted might have been got, if it had not been for the unaccountably strange conduct of Charles Elliot who completely disobeyed his instructions and tried to get the lowest terms he could,’ she complained to her uncle, the King of the Belgians. There was one light-hearted consolation. ‘Albert is so much amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong, and we think Victoria [her eldest daughter] ought to be called Princess of Hong Kong in addition to Princess Royal.’27

  Another year of battering from the cannon of the Nemesis and the Sulphur resulted in the more acquisitive Treaty of Nanking of August 1842, negotiated by Elliot’s successor, the experienced colonial governor Sir Henry Pottinger. Pottinger’s task was an easier one than Elliot’s. With Nanking on the precipice of destruction, the Qing diplomats were forced to sue for peace with a weakened hand: China agreed to pay an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars for the costs of war and the destroyed opium, transfer Hong Kong island and its harbour to British sovereignty ‘in perpetuity’, and to open up the five ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo and Shanghai to British traders and a British consulate. These ‘Treaty Ports’ and, in particular, Shanghai, became enormously significant to Sino-British trade from the mid-nineteenth century right through to the Second World War. With new rights of residence and business, the British merchants quickly exploited Shanghai’s strategic location at the mouth of the Yangtze River and its much more developed commercial market. They ran the Chinese Maritime Customs, assumed political and military control of the urban core and turned Shanghai into, if not a colonial city, then certainly a colonial-concession city.28

  Finally, it was hoped, China had been ‘opened’. ‘A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of,’ was William Gladstone’s verdict on the Opium War and capture of Hong Kong. A child of Liverpool and the free-trading son of a corn merchant, he found it painful to see the Union flag, which had always been associated ‘with the cause of justice, with opposition to oppression, with respect for national rights, with honourable commercial enterprize’, now hoisted on the coast of China ‘to protect an infamous contraband traffic’.29

  Such righteous indignation was a minority view. Most commentators regarded the Opium War and the taking of Hong Kong as a golden opportunity to demonstrate the divine energy of free trade. In contrast to India
, the British did not want a territorial empire in the Far East. ‘I had no predilection in raising a colony at Hong Kong, or at any other place in China,’ recalled Pottinger. Rather, he was convinced ‘of the necessity and desirability of our possessing such a settlement as an emporium for our trade and a place from which Her Majesty’s subjects in China may be alike protected and controlled’.30 ‘A secure and well regulated trade is all we desire,’ cooed the new foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen. Indeed the capture of Hong Kong was so high-minded a venture in free trade that Britain ‘would seek no exclusive advantages, and demand nothing that we shall not willingly see enjoyed by the subjects of all other States’.31

  In theory, the invisible hand of the free market would nurture a new era of Sino-British prosperity and peace, which would be willingly and selflessly shared out among other European and American merchants. In practice, the taking of Hong Kong was a textbook exercise in ‘gunboat diplomacy’, in which trading rights were acquired at the point of a warship’s guns and British businesses were granted special dispensations through the imposition of unequal treaties on beaten powers. Palmerston, at least, was honest about his motives, when he thanked William Jardine, in a letter of April 1842, for the ‘assistance and information’ which he and other merchants provided ‘to our affairs naval, military and diplomatic’. ‘There is no doubt that this event, which will form an epoch in the progress of the civilization of the human races, must be attended with the most important advantages to the commercial interests of England.’32 This was, in the formulation of historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, the ‘imperialism of free trade’: the exertion of political, diplomatic and sometimes military influence to secure the kind of privileged free-trade regime which worked to the explicit advantage of the colonial powers.33 Of course, British interests in Hong Kong were purely commercial – just so long as no one dared to question the political settlement underpinning them. In cruder terms, as Lord Aberdeen explained to the House of Lords, ‘he did not wish to be understood to say, that at no time should any [free] port be without a British cruiser anchored there, but no port should be long without, and he trusted that each port would always have one, except when the exigencies of the naval service might require their temporary absence’.34 The ‘well-directed guns’ of the Sulphur and the Nemesis became an essential adjunct to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The real winner, naturally, was British business. Within less than two years of the Treaty of Nanking, predicted the free-trade Friend of China, ‘the Tartar of Central Asia will trim his beard with Sheffield scissors, and every spinster in Peking must have a Coventry ribbon’.35