Extraterritorial by Matthew Hart

Author:Matthew Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

EXTRATERRITORIAL CANTON

Elliot’s difficulties in the realm of international relations are matched by his troubles within the anomalous legal-political zone that is Fanqui-town, where he can exert neither equality with the Chinese nor jurisdiction over his fellow Britons. As the political situation in Canton sours, Elliot tries to take control over the opium trade. As Ghosh tells the story, his actions meet with fierce resistance among British disciples of free trade, who argue that “there has never been any express diplomatic convention between England and China. Ergo [Elliot] is not invested with any consular powers” (RS 338). As a result, many of the foreign traders assume an even more radical kind of legal impunity than they will later be afforded in the postwar Treaties of Nanjing (1842) and Wanghia (1844). For while those treaties made Britons and Americans subject to the jurisdiction of their own diplomatic consuls, the Canton traders argue that they come under neither Chinese nor British legal authority.78 When James Innes, a particularly determined opium runner, is asked to quit Canton by the Fanqui-town chamber of commerce, he therefore bellows in reply: “No, sir, I will not leave Canton and you cannot make me do it! Let me remind you that I am not a member of this Chamber. I am a free man, sir, and I obey no mortal voice” (319). This line of reasoning leads Elliot, in turn, to castigate the whole crew of opium traders as “outlaws” who believe that they “are exempt from the operation of all law, British and Chinese” (376).79 And, indeed, when the opium traders are later challenged by the Weiyuen, the head of the Canton constabulary, about why they continue to flout Chinese imperial edicts, they appeal to the “custom for the foreign community in Canton to regulate itself” (460). Then, when the Weiyuen objects that “this custom holds only so long as you do not flout the laws of the land,” the merchants reply that, “as Englishmen and Americans, we enjoy certain freedoms under the laws of our own countries. These require us to be subject, in the first instance, to our own laws” (460). In Fanqui-town, hypocrisy abounds. Even though the Chinese state never officially relaxes its territorial claim to the ground on which Fanqui-town stands, foreigners like Innes are able, by making a series of irreconcilable claims to different kinds of extraterritorial personhood, to align themselves with English law, Chinese law, or no law at all, whatever the search for profit appears to demand.

And yet Ghosh’s Canton is never a formally extraterritorial place. By contrast with post-1842 enclaves such as the Shanghai International Settlement, the behavior of foreign residents in Canton in the 1830s was strictly controlled. In River of Smoke, one of our first accounts of life in the city comes from Fitcher Penrose, an English collector of Chinese plants, as he converses with a budding naturalist called Paulette Lambert. Penrose describes Canton as “the busiest, most crowded city I ever saw. The biggest too, bigger even than London.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.