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

There was a lot of formal, 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 industrial empires. People in Africa, South Asia, and Australia, for example, experienced colonialism as direct control by a foreign government. 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 or influence over another country. Empires did this to protect their existing colonies or to expand their economic reach. Often, the places they wanted to control would have been too difficult to conquer militarily. Let’s explore economic imperialism through opium and caffeine—two drugs that influenced the history of 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 gave it significant influence over global trade. Yet there was another, much older empire standing in the way: China.

The dynasties of China are among the most powerful states on Earth, and at the start of the nineteenth century, 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 our first drug—caffeine, or more specifically, the tea that delivered the caffeine. 

China controlled the global tea industry in the early 1800s, a time when British consumers were demanding more and more tea. Britain’s thirst for tea created a massive trade imbalance with China. (A trade imbalance is when a country is importing more than it’s exporting.) The average person in London spent five percent of their budget on tea. From 1821 to 1830, the British East India Company (EIC) spent over 19 million pounds on Chinese goods, of which more than 90 percent was spent on tea.

In contrast, the British had almost nothing the Chinese wanted. The only British good the Chinese were interested in was silver, which the Chinese used to make coins and pay taxes. Slowly, British reserves of silver ran low as British consumers demanded more tea, silk, and porcelain. 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 they called Canton, now known as Guangzhou.

But in the late eighteenth century, the EIC—which ruled most of India at the time—found something that Chinese consumers did want. This is where opium, our second drug, enters the story.

The business of addiction

While caffeine went on to appear in coffee and tea shops everywhere, the opium drama played out differently. Opium is a drug made from the seeds of the poppy plant, which the British grew in India. It is incredibly addictive, and chemicals from opium are used in heroin and morphine. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opium began to destroy Chinese society as 1 in 10 people were using the drug. The Chinese government repeatedly 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 tens of millions of people.

The EIC hired Chinese smugglers to sneak Indian-grown opium into China and sell it for silver. It then used this silver to buy tea, silk, and other goods to sell to British consumers. The result was a rapid reversal of 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 sent Lin Zexu, one of his most capable officials, to Guangzhou to end the opium trade. Punishments toward addicts and drug dealers were harsh, and many opium dealers were executed. Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests of British opium, burning the drugs or dumping them into the sea. He also banned Chinese merchants from selling food to the British and refused to pay for the destroyed opium. Fighting started in September 1839. In 1840, the British government ordered a naval fleet to China.

The First Opium War lasted from 1839 to 1842. Industrialization had provided Britain with powerful new weapons and steam-powered ships, while many Chinese soldiers were armed only with bows and old muskets. The British fleet won victory after victory and bombarded Chinese port cities into submission. 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 politicians would call the period that followed China’s “century of humiliation.” The treaty forced China to open five new ports to British merchants. China had to pay the British for the cost of the war and the opium that Lin Zexu had destroyed, and British citizens did not have to obey Chinese law while in China. The British also seized control of the island of Hong Kong, which they continued to rule until 1997. As a result of the war, British ships were permitted to transport Chinese migrant laborers to British colonies and the United States. After the abolition of slavery in British colonies, Chinese migrant laborers often did the work once done by enslaved people.

Other European nations, Japan, and the United States enforced their own unequal treaties on China. From 1856 to 1860, Britain and France fought a second Opium War against China, which China lost again. After this conflict, the United States, Russia, and Japan all increased their influence in China. In the case of Japan, China’s humiliating experience in the Opium Wars motivated the Japanese to focus on their own industrialization.

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, which Europeans had been trying to do since the late 1400s. 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 a trade good 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 early nineteenth century, China faced internal pressures that weakened the Qing state at this critical time. In the eighteenth century, the Qing Dynasty was incredibly powerful, encouraging trade in neighboring regions and expanding China’s territory and influence to its greatest extent. By 1800, however, China had entered a period of isolationism and dynastic decline. 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 internal political divisions made it harder to resist foreign influence.

The people involved in the Opium Wars knew that it was immoral. There was widespread criticism of the opium trade 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 the slave trade 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.”