While Britain was making an empire, an empire was making Britain.
Chapter Three
‘Tribute from the Red Barbarians’
By the late eighteenth century Britain was looking like a real world power. The American colonies might have been lost, but a sprightly arrogance had taken root – as the playwright Oliver Goldsmith had put it, the country ‘is stronger, fighting by herself and for herself than if half Europe were her allies’. Britain had the strongest navy afloat and some of the world’s most brilliant scientists.* The new nation was fast mechanizing the manufacturing that could transform raw materials from abroad into finished products, and was well embarked upon the urbanization that would make it the first country in which the majority of citizens lived in towns and cities. Unlike many continental European countries, its politics were reasonably settled, while France was swept by revolution and then by tyranny, from which emerged a brilliant despot who styled himself ‘emperor’. With the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 Britain could turn its attention away from the continent again and look to the rest of the world. Within four years Stamford Raffles had founded Singapore, within ten years the British had invaded Burma, within twenty years there were colonies in Western Australia and the Falkland Islands, within thirty more colonies in Aden, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Natal. Continental European nations were racked by further revolutions, notably in 1848. By contrast, many of Wellington’s generals went on to become colonial governors.
The possession of an empire was, though, never a uniquely British activity. Portugual and Spain had already taken territory in the Americas and Africa, and the Dutch had done so in southern Africa, South America and the Indies. The Ottoman Empire ran across north Africa, up through the Middle East and back across the Balkans, and at one point had laid siege to Vienna. The French still ruled land in the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean. At one time or another the Danes held colonies in the north Atlantic, Africa, the Caribbean and India. Sweden had possessions in Africa and the Caribbean and for a while ran a slave trade. The Russians held land in North America into the last third of the nineteenth century and still rule over resentful people scattered across nine time zones. ‘Owning’ colonies was considered a mark of significance, as the miserable Belgian presence in Africa testified: Belgium was created only in 1830, and yet by the turn of the twentieth century its king had his own slave state in the Congo. The newly unified nation of Italy also demanded its own ‘empire’, an ambition which reached its strutting apotheosis when the king had himself declared emperor of Abyssinia in 1936. Germany, another late entrant to the competition to enhance yourself by abasing others, established itself in Africa and the south Pacific.
The motives for seizing land were complex – sometimes commercial, sometimes military, to satisfy greed or scientific curiosity, to spread religion, to free and to oppress, to procure labour and to dump it, for strategic security and because governments had been bounced into it. But, as we have noted, the single most powerful incentive to travel and colonize was money.
In the middle years of the sixteenth century it had been commonly believed in Venice that if an Englishman could not get enough currants to eat at Christmas-time he would kill himself. This supposedly uncontrollable appetite for dried-up grape skins and other Italian delicacies offered a tidy living to anyone with the means to carry them from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. In 1583, a group of London merchants negotiated a formal arrangement to exclude competition and give themselves a monopoly in the business. The Venice Company became one of the first of the chartered companies that did so much to create the British Empire and to set a model for modern capitalism. In so doing, they disproved the subsequent Victorian claim that ‘trade follows the flag’ – the suggestion that, once red-coated British soldiers had subdued some foreign land, British merchants created a market. In fact, it was very often the other way around. Many of the architects of imperial progress sat not in parliament, the Admiralty or the War Office but in the nation’s counting houses, and governments lived with the consequences of their decisions. The empire followed no organizing template: when the flag was planted it was often simply because some sharp-elbowed businessman had got there before anyone else. Untroubled by much political interference from home, those who were willing to take risks became not merely wealthy but immensely powerful. The illegitimate Highlander George Simpson, for example – the mid-nineteenth-century head of the Hudson’s Bay Company who came to be known as ‘the birchbark emperor’ – was certainly the most powerful man in Canada and even travelled to St Petersburg to try to persuade the Russians to lease him Alaska.
Chartered companies were not unique to Britain – there were French, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Portuguese, German and Swedish equivalents – and nor was England the first country to develop them (that distinction is claimed by a Swedish mining company). But they indisputably laid many of the foundations of the British Empire, and in some places did much more. The first phase of Britain’s foreign empire was driven by capitalism, spread by sea and largely confined to those places which could be controlled from the sea.* There were advantages for governments in leaving so much of the initiative with private enterprise. Chartered companies offered the Crown influence without the necessity of affluence. When Queen Elizabeth I sold exclusive rights to trade with ‘the Great Turk’ to a group of businessmen she received an assured payment each year. Since the contract also required the ‘Turkey Merchants’ to promote English interests, she gained a rudimentary diplomatic service on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean as well. The charter of the Muscovy Company committed it to trade in ‘Regions, Dominions, Islands and places unknown’, and in trying to find a route to ‘Cathay’ by a north-east passage above the landmass of Europe the crew of one of its first fleets, made up of three little vessels, froze to death off Lapland.† The fur trappers and traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company became the largest landowners in the world.‡ The Virginia Company ‘owned’ much of the Atlantic coast of North America and, since making a return on investment required the cultivation of cash crops, became licensed to ‘plant’ settlements there. On the other side of the ocean, the Royal African Company cultivated almost nothing, but enjoyed a monopoly on the west African slave trade for a period and for fifty years supplied the Royal Mint with gold (thereby coining ‘the guinea’).
They were not called ‘merchant venturers’ for nothing: anyone who placed their faith in these companies took a risk that they might never see their money again. The distances were so vast and communications so slow that they might have to wait a year or more before they knew whether they had made any profit at all. But a risk divided is a risk reduced and the companies minimized the danger to investors by selling shares in their ventures, and then offering the security of limited liability. In their internal organization, the companies developed the single-minded focus on profit, the effective chain of command and the incentivizing of employees that are the marks of efficient capitalism. The most famous chartered company of all, the East India Company, ended up translating a British trading and diplomatic presence into an overseas government. But it was clear from the start that what motivated ‘the grandest society of merchants in the universe’ (it never really did modesty) was money rather than conquest: if it was necessary to fight, it would do so, but colonies were merely a means to an end. The Company was obliged to raise an army to defend its interests, and created dockyards in order to build ships, but its soldiers’ job was to secure trade and the ships’ purpose was to carry cargo home to Britain. And for those with the nerve to seize opportunity, the rewards could be lavish. Robert Clive arrived in India in 1744 as a clerk. He returned from Bengal to England nine years later with the means to buy a country estate. A further five-year stint in India turned him into one of the richest men in Britain. (The influx of such East India Company ‘nabobs’ who had amassed astronomical fortunes by trade, pillage and intimidation set off a characteristically British bout of class anxiety. ‘What is Eng
land now?’ worried Horace Walpole. ‘A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs … A country overrun by horse-races! A gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principle, genius, character or allies.’)
On 26 September 1792 three ships left the sheltered anchorage between the coast of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight for a very long voyage. The vessels carried 700 men, including artists, botanists, diplomats, scientists and soldiers, accompanied by a gaggle of priests. It would be a year before they achieved the object of their journey, a meeting with the emperor of China, Qianlong, who turned out to be a surprisingly sprightly eighty-three-year-old.
The mission, under the leadership of Viscount Macartney, hoped to solve an increasingly pressing problem. The British merchant-venturers had done very nicely out of the chartered-company system. But there was a glaring difficulty with China, for whose products, such as silk and porcelain, Europe had developed a healthy appetite. Most especially, the British had discovered an apparently unquenchable thirst for tea – by the time of Macartney’s mission, they were importing more than 15 million pounds of Chinese tea every year. Joseph Banks had also given Macartney – himself a keen botanist – detailed instructions on which oriental specimens to collect for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. But what British products could the Chinese be persuaded to buy in return? The trade delegation planned to show the Chinese emperor what his country was missing. To help, they had brought along all sorts of trinkets and gizmos they thought might amuse the old man – a small planetarium, scientific instruments, examples of Birmingham metalware and pieces of Wedgwood pottery.
After a year of travelling, the British were looking rather shabby. They were so exhausted and flea-bitten that when the Chinese crowds saw them, they fell about laughing. As Lord Macartney’s valet put it later, the delegation bore ‘greater resemblance to the sight provided by the removal of paupers to their parishes in England than the expected dignity of the representative of a great and powerful monarch’. The visitors had also underestimated the country they were visiting, for Imperial China considered itself the centre of the world and superior to all other civilizations. The dignity of the viscount’s party was not enhanced when Chinese officials took one look at their cargo and on the emperor’s orders demanded that retinue and baggage be transferred to thirty-seven Chinese junks before being allowed to proceed upriver towards the city of Jehol – the emperor’s summer retreat. For the avoidance of doubt a sign was nailed to one of the masts. It read ‘Tribute from the Red Barbarians’.
Protocol was a tricky question. Naturally, when the delegation finally reached the emperor’s palace, they tried to look their best. Lord Macartney overlaid a velvet suit of spotted purple with the bright-red mantle of a Knight of the Bath. His secretary, Sir George Staunton, dusted off the robes he had worn when given an honorary doctorate by Oxford University. Thus arrayed, they made their way towards the emperor, their dignity not much improved when they had to fight their way to their early-morning audience in the Garden of Ten Thousand Trees through wandering hordes of dogs, pigs and cows. At 7.00 a.m. the emperor arrived, borne on a chair by sixteen men dressed in gold, his ministers and advisers trotting behind. The leader of the visiting yahoos was admitted to The Presence, together with his secretary and page. How should they acknowledge the dignity of the ruler of the world? Visitors to the celestial throne were normally glad to fall to their knees and touch their foreheads to the ground in a kowtow. Macartney had explained to the Chinese officials beforehand that unfortunately he really wouldn’t be able to manage this, since he only went down on one knee even in front of his own king, George III. Someone suggested a compromise – perhaps the portrait of King George III the barbarians had brought with them could be hung on the wall behind the throne so that he could convince himself that he was kowtowing to his own king? Still Macartney refused to go for anything more than a one-knee bow, and the Chinese did not care for his offer to kiss the emperor’s hand. The next difficulty was that the only British person who spoke much Chinese was Lord Macartney’s twelve-year-old page, a feat which impressed the emperor, but did not make for easy conversations – all exchanges were therefore conducted through two priests brought from Italy. As they spoke little or no English, negotiations were translated first into Latin and then into Chinese. This cumbersome arrangement did not inhibit what modern diplomats would call a free and frank exchange of views when the viscount laid out the objects he had brought with him. He offered the emperor a pair of watches and a letter from George III. The emperor responded with gifts of ceremonial sceptres and a rebuff. For it was soon clear that whatever the odd-looking visitors had brought, China did not need. As the emperor explained to the British king, in a letter of masterly disdain, the two countries were utterly different in their customs, ‘and even were your envoy competent to acquire some rudiments of them, he could not transplant them to your barbarous land’. As for the finest products of British industry, ‘Strange and costly objects do not interest me. As your ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures.’
This was as comprehensive a failure as a trade mission could accomplish, even though when they returned to England the delegation did their best to belittle China: Macartney talked of it as a ‘tyranny of a handful of tartars over more than three hundred million of Chinese’, while his valet regaled the reading public with news that the Chinese ate the fleas they picked off their clothes and his comptroller reported that ‘there is not a water closet, nor a decent place of retirement in all China’. It was he, too, who provided the most resonant epitaph on the trade mission: ‘We entered Peking like paupers; we remained in it like prisoners; and we quitted it like vagrants.’ Macartney’s tedious and expensive journey had accomplished nothing. Yet the need to find something the Chinese might be prepared to buy became ever more pressing, as the British succumbed more and more to that most harmless of vices, drinking tea, whose fashionability is said to have been established by Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza, and which was soon being described as a ‘necessity’ of life. The trade was wonderful business for what an anonymous pamphlet called ‘the lordly grocers of Leadenhall Street’, where the East India Company had its imposing headquarters.* The Company, meanwhile, knew it certainly had one commodity it could sell to the Chinese in exchange. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Red Barbarians returned, and this time they came not with trinkets but with warships.
Because in a factory at Ghazipur the East India Company was refining massive quantities of opium.* It was not a commodity either introduced or invented by the British, as Mughal emperors of India had been exporting the drug for years (and some had acquired something of a taste for it themselves). Like much else in the commercial development of the subcontinent, opium now became the subject of an East India Company monopoly. It was not that the Company was unaware of its disabling, addictive properties for its Governor General in Bengal, Warren Hastings, had declared that the drug was ‘not a necessity of life but a pernicious article of luxury, which ought not to be permitted’. Unfortunately, the sentence did not end there, but continued with the clause ‘but for the purpose of foreign commerce only’. Opium may have been pernicious, but it was also precious. The main export market was in China.
The British were not the first foreigners to run drugs into China – the Arabs had been there before them, and both Dutch and French trading companies had developed lucrative businesses in the seventeenth century. What was different about the British was the scale and ruthlessness of the trade. By the middle of the 1830s over 30,000 cases of opium – each about the size of a small chest of drawers – were being smuggled into China each year. To protect the good name of those involved, the British deployed the usual subterfuges of illicit trades. Rather than being sold directly, the drug was first passed on to middlemen, some of whom might in other circumstances have passed as elders of the kirk. The most prominent of these
were a couple of Scotsmen, William Jardine, a former ship’s surgeon, and James Matheson, the grandson of a Highland minister. The company the two men founded became one of the greatest imperial trading houses, whose gleaming Hong Kong headquarters testifies to its continuing commercial success, although you will search the history section of its website in vain for an account of the company’s period as drug-runners.* At the time, neither of the two men professed the slightest ethical anxiety about what they were doing. Jardine declared that investing in opium was ‘the safest and most gentlemanly speculation that I am aware of’. Matheson considered the trade ‘morally equivalent’ to the sale of brandy or champagne in Britain.
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