Places of Encounter by Aran Mackinnon & Elaine Mackinnon

Author:Aran Mackinnon & Elaine Mackinnon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Global Encounters and Connections: Treaty-Port Encounters at Shanghai

Clearly, amphibious Shanghai, with its agricultural hinterland and its circular-walled and canal-crossed city, had a complex history prior to the Westerners’ appearance in the 1840s. Shanghai had long been a domestic and international trading center. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Western trade was confined by Manchu diktat to the southern city of Canton, the Huangpu River continued to provide berths to coastal ships from northern and southern China, Japan, Liuqiu (also known as the Ryukyu Kingdom, a Chinese dependency until 1879 when it was forcibly annexed by Japan), and Korea. Almost everyone except Westerners traded in Shanghai, the hub port and central customs city for the teeming Jiangnan hinterland—an area that included the richest and most productive districts in the world’s wealthiest empire.

However, in 1765, in the same decade in which Shanghai’s Sea Merchants Guild donated the Yuyuan garden to the City God Temple, Scotsman James Watt sparked the Industrial Revolution while strolling on Glasgow Green. His invention of the steam engine’s separate condenser eventually made feasible Glasgow’s and Manchester, England’s industrialized textile mills, as well as Britain’s steam navy and its worldwide gunboat diplomacy. Britain was now able to dispatch its modern, industrialized armed forces around the world and, within a few decades, to control a quarter of the globe outright. With the help of its merchant adventurers, the Royal Navy, and a responsive Parliament, Britain (and other trading nations who imitated its industrial advances) soon reversed its unfavorable balance of trade with China and brought the mighty Qing Empire to its knees through force of arms, trade, and Christianity. Meanwhile, with Western merchants flocking to Shanghai, the city and its port benefited from China’s steady reversals, a fact that later condemned the city in the eyes of nationalistic twentieth-century reformers and revolutionaries.

Chartered by the English queen Elizabeth I in 1600, the British East India Company (EIC) first arrived in China in 1689 and held the British monopoly on the China trade— chiefly silk and cotton textiles, tea, and porcelain—until 1834. For much of that time, Manchu China conducted its own maritime trade via a lightly regulated multiple-port system that reversed late Ming policies and allowed traders to put in at coastal ports largely of their own choosing. In 1760, exasperated by problems caused by unruly Western traders, the Qianlong emperor confined them all to a seasonal trade in Canton. Withdrawing from the riskier modes of the China trade, the EIC then subcontracted so-called country traders such as Scotsman William “Iron-Headed Old Rat” Jardine to transport commodities on the routes between its possessions in Bengal, India, and Canton. Both the EIC and the multinational country traders now became complicit in selling the illegal (by Chinese law) narcotic—Bengal opium—that reversed Britain’s China trade imbalances. “Recreational” narcotics such as opium created their own customer base that was willing to pay ever-higher prices, and, as a result, Britain’s and other Western traders’ balance sheets with the Chinese Empire appeared to improve.

Bridling

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