To understand how two drugs changed the world in the nineteenth century, you first need to understand economic imperialism.

There was a lot of direct imperialism in the nineteenth century. If you look at the map below, you can see lots of areas in pink and green. Those areas were controlled directly by empires. People in Africa, South Asia, and Australia, for example, were colonized by foreign governments. However, a lot of places on the map below—such as the Ottoman Empire, China, and most of Latin America—aren’t green or pink. These lands weren’t conquered by industrial empires, instead they experienced colonialism indirectly through economic imperialism.

Economic imperialism is when an empire has indirect control over another country. Empires did this to protect their existing colonies or to expand their economic reach. Often, these countries would have been too hard to conquer militarily. Let’s explore economic imperialism through the opium and caffeine trade between the British and Qing empires.

A tale of two drugs

In the early nineteenth century, Britain’s rapid industrialization, powerful navy, and control over India made the empire very strong. However, China was the world’s strongest economy. Trade flowed from China across the Silk Roads and Indian Ocean, and money streamed back in. This is where we encounter caffeine, or more specifically, the tea that delivered the caffeine.

China controlled the global tea market in the early nineteenth century. Tea was hugely popular in Britain at the time, which created a massive trade imbalance with China. A trade imbalance is when a country imports more goods than it exports. From 1821 to 1830, the British East India Company (EIC) spent over 19 million pounds on Chinese goods, almost all of it on tea. The EIC was a powerful British trading company that controlled much of India in the 1800s.

In contrast, the British had almost nothing the Chinese wanted. The Chinese were only interested in British silver, which it used to make coins and pay taxes. Britain ran low on silver as British consumers demanded more tea. In the 1750s, the Qing Emperor had restricted foreign merchants, making it difficult for Europeans to access Chinese consumer goods. From about 1760 to 1842, foreign merchants were only allowed to do business in the port city of Canton, now known as Guangzhou.

But in the late eighteenth century, the EIC found something that Chinese consumers did want—opium.

The business of addiction

Opium is a drug made from the seeds of the poppy plant, which the British grew in India. Chemicals from opium are used in morphine, a drug used to treat pain. When used in the wrong way, opium can be very dangerous. People can easily become addicted or dependent on opium. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opium began to destroy Chinese society, with 1 in 10 people using the drug. The Chinese government outlawed opium. Nonetheless, the British had finally found something they could trade for Chinese tea, and they weren’t willing to stop just because it was illegal and harming people.

The EIC hired Chinese smugglers to sneak Indian opium into China and sell it for silver. It then used this silver to buy tea and other goods to sell in Britain. This quickly reversed the trade imbalance between China and Britain. By the 1820s, silver was flowing out of China as the British smuggled in more opium. In the century between 1730 and 1830, the volume of opium entering China increased by 20,000 percent.

The Opium Wars

By 1838, the Qing Emperor told Lin Zexu, one of his top officials, to end the opium trade. Punishments were harsh, and many opium dealers were killed. Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests of British opium, and also refused to pay British merchants for the destroyed goods. Fighting began in September 1839 and the British government sent ships to China in 1840.

The First Opium War lasted from 1839 to 1842. Industrialization had made Britain stronger. It had powerful new weapons and steam-powered ships, while many Chinese soldiers were armed only with bows and old muskets. The British won victory after victory and by the summer of 1842, the Chinese were forced to accept a treaty to end the war.

The Treaty of Nanjing launched a period in Chinese history known as the “unequal treaties” era. Chinese lawmakers would call the period that followed China’s “century of humiliation.” The treaty forced China to open five new ports to British merchants. It required that China pay the British for the cost of the war and the opium that Lin Zexu had destroyed. It also said that British citizens didn’t have to obey Chinese laws in China, just British law. The British took control of the island of Hong Kong, which they ruled until 1997. After the war, British ships were permitted to transport Chinese workers to British colonies and the United States.

Other countries in Europe, Japan, and the United States also pushed their own unequal treaties on China. From 1856 to 1860, Britain and France fought a second Opium War against China, which China lost. After this conflict, the United States, Russia, and Japan all increased their presence in China.

A century of humiliation

The Opium Wars marked a turning point in world history. This was the first time that a European empire was able to reverse a trade imbalance with China. Why did this happen and why did China enter its “century of humiliation”?

The British certainly had advantages. Industrialization gave Britain better weapons than China, and Indian opium gave Britain something that Chinese consumers would buy. The choices by British and Chinese officials set the course of this conflict, but that’s not the whole story.

In the eighteenth century, the Qing Dynasty had been incredibly powerful. It encouraged trade in neighboring regions and expanded China’s territory and influence to its greatest extent. By 1800, however, China had been weakened by its isolationist policies. Isolationism is when a country avoids political or economic involvement with other countries. The opium trade and wars made these weaknesses worse. From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping Revolution sent China into civil war and killed 20 million people. Among the demands revolutionaries made was an end to the opium trade. As the Qing state became weaker, more uprisings and disagreements between lawmakers made it harder to resist foreign influence.

The people involved in the Opium Wars knew that it was wrong. The opium trade was widely criticized in both Britain and the United States. (The US bought opium from the Ottoman Empire, and then sold it to China.) Many critics compared the opium trade to enslavement in its immorality. In 1840, William Gladstone, who would later become Britain’s prime minister, remarked: “A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of.”