Military Misdemeanours

Misrule, Britannia

The century between Waterloo and the First World War (1815-1914) is often referred to as the Pax Britannica. Aping the Pax Romana ('Roman Peace') the dominant British Empire was thought to have bought stability to much of the world, whether its help was wanted or not.

All over the world countries somehow found themselves being governed by over-dressed, polite, reasonable gentlemen from a small, damp, overcast island somewhere halfway round the globe on the north-eastern edge of the Atlantic. Even now people are wondering how the British got away with it for so long.

During this supposed period of peace, not a year passed by without British soldiers being engaged in conflict somewhere on the planet. Naturally, with so many soldiers busy painting the planet red, scandals were aplenty.

Of course, one of the great cornerstones of the British Empire and its army was tea. Through deserts, jungles, mountains, and on the high seas, the British endured all with a calming 'cuppa'. Even today, faced with competition from exotic herbal infusions, lattés and espressos, tea still enjoys a lofty position among hot beverages, with 62 billion cups drunk in Britain every single year.

The chief importer of tea up to the Victorian era was the British East India Company. It was probably the most successful commercial enterprise in the history of trade and, contrary to British notions of fair play, totally unscrupulous when it felt the urge. Since 1600 the East India Company had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on trade with the East and in particular the import of tea. Until the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857, it also ruled large swathes of India, having its own military bases and, thanks to Charles II, a mandate to start wars in order to secure and protect its deals.

Although the East India Company was dominant in India, most of the world's tea came from China. To avoid running up a trade deficit with China, the East India Company funded the purchase of tea by selling opium back to the Chinese. The opium was grown on East India Company land in India and shipped by the boat load into China. To use modern parlance, the East India Company literally flooded the market with the drug and, before long, drug use along the coastal areas was endemic, with an estimated 3 million Chinese using opium.

Faced with this terrible scourge, in 1836 the Chinese authorities began to take on what amounted to probably the biggest narcotics cartel in the history of the world. The Chinese criminalized the abuse of opium and clamped down on opium dens where the drug was smoked. As a deterrent, anyone caught with opium or found using it would suffer the death penalty, as would traffickers bringing opium into the country.

Despite the illegality of the opium trade, the British scandalously continued to pump it in, bribing Chinese officials to turn a blind eye to their actions. Aware the trade was still flourishing, in 1839 a Chinese government official, Lin Tse-hsu, got tough, confiscated and destroyed 20,183 chests of British opium. Lin then wrote a letter to the British monarch, Queen Victoria, in which he quite reasonably asked for her intervention against the illegal traffic in drugs. He bemoaned the 'barbarian merchants' smuggling opium into China for the pursuit of profit and asked Victoria if she would eradicate the opium fields in British-controlled India.

Britain's response was to attack China and thus began the First Chinese War of 1839-42. This was better known as the Opium War, and in it the Chinese were no match for the modern British Army and suffered a succession of defeats. The war resulted in the Treaty of Nanking (1842), under which China ceded Hong Kong to Britain and paid the British £2 million - a strange case of paying compensation for being attacked. Britain was granted most-favoured nation status and, among other things, allowed to continue the sale of opium as never before.