Empire of Crime Read online

  As the Chinese demand for opium grew, so did concern at its deleterious effects. The Chinese government of the Qing Dynasty (also known as Ch’ing or Manchu) introduced a succession of bans on its importation, but British merchants got round them by selling their goods to independent middlemen, who smuggled the drug into China. It was too profitable not to. The beneficiaries included Chinese customs officials and bureaucrats, who grew rich on tariffs and kickbacks from the Chinese merchants selling the drug to their population.

  Opium was sold at auction in India for four times the amount it cost to grow and process it. Between 1806 and 1809, British traders received seven million silver dollars for opium. At a stroke, it reversed the trade imbalance in tea and made members of the East India Company rich – but this was just the beginning of a narcotics boom. The price of opium was high in China and was enjoyed only by the wealthy classes. At first, this suited the British traders just fine because they didn’t want to rock the boat by flooding the Chinese market. But then economic demands pressed them to go further.

  The rise of factory-produced cotton, sold from Britain to India, meant that Indian merchants needed to find cash to pay for it, and they turned to opium, encouraging a dramatic growth in its production and a subsequent fall in price. British merchants wanted to increase the amount of opium going into China, but the Chinese only permitted its import through Canton, so that they could control it. In 1833, the British government ended the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with China, allowing any Englishman to trade with the Heavenly Kingdom. One of the new companies was Jardine, Matheson & Co.

  Dr William Jardine and James Matheson were both Scotsmen who broke away from the East India Company to establish their own immensely lucrative trade in opium and other commodities with China. From their base in Hong Kong, they grew so rich that when James Matheson retired back to Scotland he bought the Isle of Lewis for half a million pounds and built a castle on it. Jardine became an MP and built a magnificent townhouse at 6 Upper Belgrave Street near Buckingham Palace, as well as having his own castle in Perthshire. The multinational corporation known as Jardines still thrives today.

  The opium trade rocketed from 18,000 chests to 30,000. One chest of raw opium balls weighed roughly 140 lb. Each chest could sell for £100. In contrast, a policeman in Victorian England might earn £1 a week.

  As the opium habit spread among the Chinese middle classes, alarm bells began to ring and the Chinese government feared a breakdown in society, as millions of their formerly productive citizens drifted away from work on opium binges. The Qing Emperor appointed a no-nonsense commissioner, Lin Zexu, to end the trade by closing ports to British ships and seizing opium. British ships were boarded in international waters and their cargo destroyed. The rapidly escalating animosity culminated in the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839.

  In an act of aggression that still angers the Chinese today, British imperial warships backed up the demands of British traders to open up Chinese ports to their goods, including opium. With far superior military technology, the British captured Canton, blew up Chinese ships and humiliated the Chinese Emperor. The subsequent Treaty of Nanking allowed the British to trade in four ports, gave them special privileges and ceded Hong Kong to Queen Victoria. The USA and France soon after concluded similarly beneficial trading treaties with China.

  Not everyone in England was impressed by the outcome. The Times thundered at the opium trade foisted on the Chinese. Its editorial argued that Britain should wash its hands of the business – ‘that we should cease to be mixed up in it, to foster it, or to make it a source of Indian revenue’.

  We owe some moral compensation to China for pillaging her towns and slaughtering her citizens in a quarrel which never could have arisen if we had not been guilty of this national crime.

  A young William Ewart Gladstone MP – a future prime minister – had just come back from a trip to Italy with his beloved sister. She was hooked on opium-based laudanum and suffering terribly from her addiction. Furiously, he condemned the opium war in the House of Commons. When an opposition MP boasted of his pride at seeing the British Union flag flying over a burning Canton, Gladstone was scathing.

  We all know the animating effects which have been produced in the minds of British subjects on many critical occasions when that flag has been unfurled in the battlefield. It is because it has always been associated with the cause of justice, with opposition to oppression, with respect for national rights, with honourable commercial enterprise, but now that flag is hoisted to protect an infamous contraband traffic, and if it were never to be hoisted except as it is now hoisted on the coast of China, we should recoil from its sight with horror …

  The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, countered this crusading anger by pointing out that Chinese aggression towards British merchants had been motivated not by concern for their people’s morality but because of their ballooning trade deficit with Britain.

  As China suffered terribly during the civil war of the Taiping Rebellion, Britain continued its lucrative trade in opium. Conflict broke out again between the two countries when Qing officials searched a Hong Kong-registered ship in 1856. The British retaliated by seizing Canton. France joined in and both nations’ troops marched on Beijing, burning down the Emperor’s Summer Palace. In no position to fight off a modern European army, the Chinese ratified their earlier trade treaty, opened up more ports and paid millions of ounces of silver to Britain and France for their trouble.

  Lin Zexu had tried to conduct an anti-opium campaign within China, arresting hundreds of local dealers and destroying their drugs, but in the wake of the Second Opium War, the trade took another leap skywards. Opium imports increased from 58,000 chests in 1859 to 105,000 chests in 1879. To ensure that the money flowed smoothly, the British took over the running of the entire Chinese customs service, putting it under the control of Sir Robert Hart and his staff of 89 Europeans, half of whom were British. As the London Economist of 1898 commented: ‘The Customs Houses of China are within reach of British shells.’

  The British government was becoming addicted to its opium profits. It has been estimated that between one-fifth and one-sixth of the British Indian Exchequer’s income came from the business. But still there was a vociferous group that could not accept the legitimacy of the trade.

  Sir Wilfrid Lawson’s money came from railroads. He was director of the Maryport and Carlisle Railway. Becoming Liberal MP for Carlisle in 1859, he quickly gained a reputation as a vigorous campaigner for temperance. His style was passionate and radical. He had campaigned for the abolition of the House of Lords and disarmament, and it was natural for him to express outrage at Britain’s continuing part in the opium trade.

  In May 1870, the 41-year-old Lawson stood up in the House of Commons and argued for the motion ‘That this House condemns the system by which a large portion of the Indian Revenue is raised from Opium’. At the heart of his argument was the belief that what is morally wrong can never be politically right. He explained that the government of India had changed since the days when it was in the hands of East India Company merchants and that the British government now took a more direct role in the administration of the country.

  ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘I rejoice to say that the old-spirited foreign policy, which consisted, as far as I could understand it, in bullying the weak and truckling to the strong, is dead – I hope never to revive again.

  ‘The House must understand that this opium, as prepared and sold by the Indian government, is not medical opium; it is not a drug intended for the soothing of men’s pains and sufferings.’

  Quoting a medical expert, Lawson claimed that the majority of opium smokers ‘advance rapidly towards death, after having passed through successive stages of idleness, debauchery, poverty, the ruin of their physical strength, and the complete prostration of their intellectual and moral faculties. Nothing can stop a smoker who has made much progress in the habit.’

  Lawson rounded on
the assembled MPs and pressed a guilt button that made some nod their heads and others bristle with indignation: ‘Slavery was not productive of more misery and death than was the opium traffic, nor were Britons more implicated in the former than in the latter.’

  Lawson believed that the British Empire should be a vehicle for spreading goodness in the world, not evil. He feared that the result of the Opium Wars was a growing hatred for the British in the Far East. ‘We carried on the war in the most horrible manner,’ he said, ‘and, among other outrages, perpetrated the greatest piece of vandalism of the present century, in burning and looting the Emperor’s Summer Palace.’

  Lawson gestured towards the leader of his party, sitting on the front bench. Sir William Ewart Gladstone, now sixty-one years old, had become Prime Minister of Great Britain just two years before and now had the power to enact his earlier beliefs. Lawson reminded the senior politician of his youthful anger at the First Opium War and quoted him directly: ‘A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, he did not know and had not read of.’

  Gladstone sat impassively, staring at the Opposition waving their papers at him, taunting him about his past comments. Lawson was in full flow and described the difficulties now faced by Christian missionaries in China. He read out a letter describing the hostility experienced by Protestant missionaries, one having been chased out of a city in Hunan by a mob, its leader saying, ‘You burned our palace; you killed our Emperor; you sell poison to the people; now you come professing to teach us virtue.’

  Lawson said that some claimed the opium trade was no worse than selling alcohol at home. ‘All I can say is, that two blacks do not make one white.’ And there was a major difference between Britain’s manufacturers of gin and what was happening in the Far East. ‘The government themselves are the dealers in opium; they grow the opium, and sell it to the highest bidder.

  ‘But the real argument is this – the Indian government says it wants the money, and has no other way of getting it.’ Looking down at his notes, Lawson quoted a Treasury Minister who had produced a pamphlet on the subject. ‘“Prevention of the trade is a sacrifice to morality so great,” said the Treasury Minister, “that we hardly ought to impose it on our Hindoo [sic] subjects until we have washed our hands clean by ceasing ourselves to manufacture gin. Until then England surely has no right to force India to be more moral than itself, unless it is prepared to make up to India out of the English taxes the £4,000,000 which this morality would cost.”’

  Lawson was coming to the end of his speech.

  ‘I am not calling upon the Government immediately to disarrange all their Indian finance. I know it is impossible for them to act at once on any such Resolution; and I am not bringing a railing accusation against any Ministry or against any party. I believe that we have all been guilty.

  ‘We have all suffered this evil to go on too long. It is time to put a stop to such an evil and all I ask this House to declare is that they are ready to sustain Her Majesty’s Government in carrying out an Eastern policy more in accordance with the claims of justice, humanity, and national morality.’

  It was a bravura performance from Lawson that conveyed exactly the strong sense of moral purpose shared by many senior figures in Victorian Britain. The immense wealth and power brought to their shores by the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire could only be acceptable if it was used for the good of mankind as a whole – not just the benefit of greedy Brits. It was an emotional and philosophical argument that grew stronger through the rest of the century.

  But in the crowded chamber of the House of Commons on that May evening, someone had to speak out for the realities of imperial survival and that person was Grant Duff. A 41-year-old Aberdeenshire lawyer by training, he was the Undersecretary for India in Gladstone’s government and had full access to the figures.

  ‘The net average amount of our Opium Revenue during the last five years, for which the accounts had been laid before Parliament, was £5,781,890,’ Duff told the MPs. ‘In the year 1867–8 – the last for which the accounts had been laid before Parliament – it rose to the great total of £7,049,447, after all expenses had been paid. In short, it amounted to between one-fifth and one-sixth of our whole net Revenue.’

  The figures raised eyebrows. It was not the sort of sum of money you could easily say ‘no’ to.

  ‘Unlike most items of national Revenue,’ Duff told the House, ‘these millions were not the product of a tax upon our own subjects … They were a contribution paid chiefly by China, partly by the Indo-Chinese Peninsula and the Eastern Islands, to help us to make India what we desired her to be, and what, if rash hands did not interfere, she might well become – one of the most prosperous portions of the earth’s surface.’

  To Duff and the architects of the British Empire, it seemed a rather neat transaction that an opium-addicted Chinese middle class should pay for Britain’s upkeep of India.

  ‘Was it worth seriously discussing – was it conceivable,’ wondered Duff, ‘that the British taxpayer – not too lightly burdened already – would allow himself to be mulcted to the tune of some £6,000,000 annually in order that he might pay a benevolence to India? If we were to give up the powerful lever for raising the position of India which this opium Revenue gave us – if we were to give up the better part of our golden dream of improvement and civilisation – would it not be wise to reconsider the whole question of our connection with India?

  ‘To put it plainly, if at one blow the opium Revenue was struck away, the Indian Empire would be on the high road to bankruptcy.’

  Duff then explained the machinery of the opium business to the House. The Indian government received three sources of income from it. A small income derived from licences given to retail dealers to sell opium – but comparatively little was consumed in India. It received a much larger income from what was known as the ‘Bengal monopoly’ and from the tax on the opium exported through Bombay ports. The Bengal monopoly meant that no one was allowed to cultivate opium without a licence. That licence was obtained by agreeing to deliver dried poppy juice at a fixed price to the government factories situated at Patna in the North-West Frontier Province and at Benares in Bengal.

  The poppy was a favourite crop among Indian farmers because of the high rate of return it generated for the amount of land used. After the juice was scraped off the poppies, it was sent in jars to a government depot, where it was prepared with infinite care. ‘The object being to produce as good a quality as possible,’ said Duff, ‘for it was upon quality, rather than quantity, that our profits depended. China alone could grow any quantity of opium [but] our object was to produce an opium so good that those who chose to buy from us might, at least, get an excellent article of its kind.’

  Once the opium had been processed, it was packed in 140-lb chests and sent to Calcutta, where it was disposed of at monthly sales by auction. ‘The profit to the Government,’ said Duff, ‘consisting of the difference between the price it paid for the crude poppy juice and the price it received for the manufactured article, less all the expenses of manufacture and transport.’ Most of the opium sold at Calcutta was bought by native Indian merchants, who took it to China. Further income came from imposing an export tax or ‘pass fee’ on the produce before it left port.

  ‘We did not invent the system,’ explained Duff, ‘we inherited it.’

  Having heard Lawson’s fierce argument against the morality of the opium trade and Duff’s economic justification for it, it was now time that the assembled MPs heard from their Prime Minister, William Gladstone – a man who, 30 years earlier, had cursed the evil of the Opium War and had lost his own sister to the pernicious drug.

  As Gladstone rose to his feet, Lawson shifted forward in his seat, hoping that the passionate fury of the young man could still inflame the decision-making of the wiser and older politician.

  ‘About the wars which have grown out of questions connect
ed with the opium trade,’ said Gladstone solemnly, ‘do not let it be supposed for one moment that there now continues that state of things out of which those most unhappy and most discreditable transactions – to say the least – arose 10, 20 or 30 years back. That state of things has totally and absolutely disappeared.’

  Once China had accepted the importation of opium and taxed the drug to its own benefit, Gladstone felt the situation had changed.

  ‘From the moment that was done, the question of the growth of opium became wholly detached from all political considerations, and became a matter of fiscal arrangement.’

  The Prime Minister said that such a monumental motion to remove the income stream provided by the narcotic would require a thorough Parliamentary inquiry. It would need to discuss the nature of opium and its use, and whether the use of opium was necessarily connected with its abuse.

  ‘If that inquiry be made,’ said Gladstone, eliciting the smiles of his closest colleagues, ‘I hope my honourable Friend the Member for Carlisle [Lawson] will not be Chairman of the Committee, because, excellent as he is in every other relation, he is merciless in his dealings with that portion of his fellow creatures who are inclined to the greater or lesser use of stimulants, so that he cannot be an altogether impartial judge.’

  Gladstone was, in effect, calling Lawson a bit of a party-pooper.

  ‘It is easy to find painful, horrible, heartrending descriptions of the effect produced by an excessive use of opium,’ he continued. ‘But, on the other hand, there is much evidence to contradict that statement, and to show that, although the use of opium is undoubtedly attended with excess in certain cases, and although that excess is in China what the use of alcohol undoubtedly is in this country – a most fertile source of disgrace, misery, sin and crime – yet they are upon a par, and there is a legitimate and reasonable use of both opium and alcohol.’