The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss THE OPIUM WARS: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Julie Lovell. On this occasion, members of the RAS Book Club will have the opportunity to discuss the book among themselves without the participation of the author, leaving the group free to pursue their own line of discussion and dialogue.N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.
ABOUT THE OPIUM WARS: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China
By the 1780s, the British appetite for tea and the Chinese indifference to British goods had produced a trade deficit that the East India Company began to fill by supplying opium from British Bengal. The trade was profitable and the traders convinced themselves that they were merely supplying for an existing demand. In December 1838, the emperor appointed Lin Zexu as commissioner in Canton with instructions to stamp out the opium trade. Within two months, Lin had arrested 1,600 smokers and confiscated nearly 14 tonnes of opium. He reported to the emperor that the matters were concluded satisfactorily. The Chinese were stunned when British warships approached their southern coast in July 1840 to avenge the injuries inflicted on British subjects over the preceding months. The first battle lasted nine minutes. This was the start of the first Opium War – a series of unequal military encounters that lasted until 1842. A second Opium War climaxed in 1860 with the looting and burning of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops. By the end of these military episodes in 1842, Britain was in possession of Hong Kong. Each side’s view of the other was ingrained.The Opium War is both the story of modern China (starting with the first conflict with the West) and an analysis of the country’s contemporary self-image. It explores how China’s national myths mould its interactions with the outside world, how public memory is spun to serve the present, and how delusion and prejudice on both sides have bedevilled China’s relationship with the modern West. Julia Lovell teaches modern Chinese history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is author of The Great Wall: China Against the World and The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, and writes on China for the Guardian, the Independent and the Times Literary Supplement. Her many translations of modern Chinese fiction include, most recently, Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China.