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American Missionaries and the Opium Trade in Nineteenth-Century China
MICHAEL C. LAZICH
Buffalo State College
| The nineteenth century witnessed profound changes in interstate relations as the nations of the West struggled to acquire wealth, power, and prestige in the competitive context of the industrial revolution. The diplomatic rhetoric of the era spoke in progressive terms of a community of equal nations governed by the liberal ideals of the European Enlightenment, but the reality of Western expansionism revealed a less principled agenda. Those societies incapable or unwilling to participate in the new world order were regarded as antiquated or immature and thus in need of reform or even, to borrow a recently popularized phrase, "regime change." The less honorable aspects of Western imperialism were thus scrupulously hidden behind the "civilizing mission" publicly proclaimed by most of the major Western powers. But as the historical evidence amply attests, the changes forced upon the traditional societies of the non-Western world were fashioned primarily to facilitate a more thorough exploitation of their natural and economic resources. |
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There were also, however, major cultural forces at work shaping the new international order in the nineteenth century. The missionary movement provided the most prominent example of this. Christian missionaries, deeply motivated by the zeal of their convictions and the imperative force of their religious ideology, served as the vanguard of Western cultural penetration wherever they ventured to establish themselves. And while their methods and goals were not always in harmony with those of their profit-seeking countrymen, missionaries would come to serve a predominant role in shaping the earliest formal diplomatic relations between the Western powers and the traditional societies and governments of the non-Western world. One of the most interesting examples of this is found in the development of early Sino-American relations and the negotiation of the first formal treaties between the United States and the imperial government of Qing dynasty China. |
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One of the most contentious and morally problematic issues that Americans were obliged to address in their early diplomatic relations with the Chinese was the opium trade. The impact of the opium trade on the social and economic fortunes of nineteenth-century China has long been one of the more controversial topics in the history of Sino-Western relations. This is particularly true with respect to the broader ethical and political questions of moral culpability. Indeed, assessing the interacting roles of enterprising smugglers, "conniving" Chinese officials, Christian missionaries, and the British and American governments is a subtle task that requires the consideration of a broad range of integrated factors and motivations. Fortunately, there is no shortage of sources from which to study the views and objectives of those who either participated in or were obliged somehow to contend with the opium trade. Missionary documents, treaty-port newspapers, the diplomatic correspondence of both Chinese and Western officials, along with many other pertinent contemporary records provide a wealth of information regarding opium in China. The object of this paper is to examine how America's earliest Christian missionaries to China responded to the opium trade and how they influenced the policies of their government toward it in the years surrounding the establishment of the treaty-port system. |
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