Maritime Order

Mead gives a nicely varnished picture of British establishment and support of its global maritime order. He doesn’t deny that the British broke some eggs, but he’s more interested in the omelet.

C.A. Bayly’s superb The Birth of the Modern World: 1780-1914 (Blackwell History of the World) gives more on-the-ground details. Britain’s rise to maritime dominance was driven by ideological support for free trade and the practical necessity of finding raw materials and food to support the growing and industrializing population of the UK. If trade partners didn’t want to play by the rules of free trade, Britain was willing to force them: “British statesmen in general and Lord Palmerston, British foreign secretary and prime minister, in particular, wished devoutly to open up world trade and believed it was right to do so by force of arms if necessary . . . . During the 1820s and 1830s . . . British governments were in constant conflict with the authorities in some independent states of Latin America which did not sign up to free trade, about the tariffs and taxes which British merchants were forced to pay to import their goods. In 1840, Palmerston sent a fleet into the Bay of Naples to force the Bourbon Neapolitan government to bring down tariffs . . . . The [European] powers bludgeoned the Ottomans into reducing important tariffs wherever they could. This was one reason why they supported the independence of Greece from Istanbul.”

The Opium War (1839-1842) is the most “striking example” of Britain’s forcible opening of markets.

Chinese authorities were alarmed at the flow of silver from China to India to pay for opium, opium that was traded in China by the East India Company. Chinese officials were also worried that opium use among soldiers was harming military discipline, and they saw opium spreading throughout the peasantry. When the East India Company’s monopoly of the trade was ended in 1834, British and American merchants flooded China with even more opium. Chinese authorities debated whether to legalize or criminalize, and while they debated opium piled up on the docks in Canton. Eventually, “the imperial court sent a magistrate to destroy the drug,” an act that Britain took as an “attack on British property” that sparked a military response. Britain saw itself protecting its commercial interests: “The revenues of the government of India, and so of the British government itself, were at risk. Opium duty account for roughly 20 percent of total Indian revenues.”