Taking a Look at the Opium War

China has 5000 years of history which experienced wars, collapses, failures and successes. The Opium War in the year 1839 and 1856 marked the changing point of China’s trade policy with foreigners, especially with British in opium and tea. China changed from getting tributes to being forced to sign the Nanjing Treaty and Tianjing Treaty with British and French. Due to China’s over confidence and unwelcome attitude toward foreigners and opium, it caused the British to declare the Opium War to China which made Chinese suffer for many years, but at the same time it also forced China to open its doors to the foreigners.

While westerners in China pushed to claim rights and generally oppose Chinese reformers who worked to better China, the Chinese government and society continued to face internal problems.

During the rule of Justinian (527-565 CE) this empire was expanded to the greatest size that it would ever reach. Because it was so big, Justinian assigned two capitals for the empire, and as this happened, there was transfer of goods and technologies through both capitals. Because the empire was so big and the amount of merchandise and money that was managed through the empire was so broad, Justinian implemented the use of banking, which changed completely the way people earned money, saved their money, and traded goods to get money from them to bank it. As this happened in the Byzantine Empire, China fell into a cultural exchange of goods, technologies, and ideas that came from the Silk Roads. It was during the Tang and Song dynasties that this trade was at its peak. At the time, besides receiving goods from Europe and other neighbors through the complex routes of trading, the Chinese developed their own technologies for their own exportation. Among these technologies there was large metallurgical production, invention of gunpowder, naval technologies, rapid and cheap printing, and porcelain. These technologies enhanced even more trade for China and due to this, paper money was invented for the purpose of controlling trade; the same thing that occurred with the Byzantine Empire and banking. Even though China invented more technologies than the Byzantine Empire, both became major trade hotspots in their own way and invented systems to

A major effect of the global flow of silver is the economic dependency required.In Document 5, Xu Dunqui Ming purposefully explains the growing of heavy silver use in his city’s economics in 1610, leading to silver becoming the required and standard payment for cloth dying and other services, along with silver now a necesity in their lives.Wth this new standard payment of silver in China, where it is unaccessible in their own environment, they depend on Europe and Spain to in exhange for China’s goods pay in silver to make it readily available for China’s inhabitants. In

Imperialism is like a kingpin putting his hardest working, most experienced partners in a territory that they have sole control over, with the main job of making the money to bring back to the kingpin, getting their “cut” thereafter. It was the same for the British. Imperialism was vastly growing in the new British Empire. New Imperialism gave rise in East Asia and Africa with the new trade networks and new products and goods that were made to be profitable. According to Abina and the Important Men, palm oil became a new “golden” standard for the British. It was a necessity to how machines in factories worked post-Industrialization era. As for East Asia, opium became extremely profitable, although it put many of the population(s) at extreme

Documents 3,5,6, 7 and 8 all mention how the economy changed dramatically due to the arrival and growth of silver as a currency. In document 3, a Ming dynasty court official writes about how the silver coin is hard to come by because the government is hoarding all of it. They take silver for taxes but do not redistribute it to the people. He is writing this because he is trying to convince the emperor to distribute the silver more appropriately to the people, and because his family is obviously not doing well financially. He is a court official who most likely has small influence in the government and writes in hopes of getting the emperor to consider spreading the wealth to the lower classes of China, to save his family, and other families like his. Document 5 expresses a different, but somewhat related view about how silver has become a hindrance to regular business interactions, because customers can no longer trade items of their own to purchase goods, they have to go through a lengthy process to pay everything in silver. Document 6 shows a counter point of view about the wealth that the mining of silver has brought to Spain. Document 7 is a report written to convince the emperor of China that there is much wealth to be found in foreign trade, because of how much silver some countries will pay for Chinese goods. Finally, document 8 examines how European countries are able to purchase Asian commodities freely because of their immense supply

Document 5 also demonstrates this pattern of economic trade based on silver. The document, written to recount how the introduction of silver affected China’s economy, reports with a wistful tone that Chinese markets began to charging customers in silver, rather than accepting crops and animals as a form of payment. This can be attributed to China’s trade with European merchants, as the Chinese usually sought payment for their

Silver, the monopoly of the old world changed many things. In China, there was such a lust for silver that they now began interacting with Europe. Spain began venturing to the Americas in search for silver. Doc. 3, 5, and 6 talks about how China was hurting their own economy by hording the silver and they didn’t give it back out to their people, Doc. 2 and 4 explains Asian trade and how it changed China, Doc. 7 and 8 talks about how China benefited from the silver trade the most. Doc. 3, 5, and 6 talks about how China was hurting their own economy by hording the silver and they didn’t give it back out to their people.

Opium wars-Opium Wars is two wars that between china and Britain over the endeavors of the Chinese government to stop the increase of foreign created opium imported by Britain. California Gold rush-fast inundation of fortune searchers in California that started after gold was found at Sutter's Mill in mid-1848 and its climax in 1852 Transcontinental railroad-The First Transcontinental Railroad in North America was built in the 1860s, connecting the rail route system of the East drift with California. Civil War- War between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, the Union formed their own country to protect the institution of slavery.   Chinese immigrants- Chinese immigrants migrated to the United States in the

One extremely prosperous time of the trade in China was in the Ming Dynasty under the reign of Yonglo. This was because during this period, the explorer, Zheng He, was promoting the trade with China and showing off the Chinese culture through goods like silk or ceramic art. He went on seven voyages to places like Southeast Asia, the Indian Coast, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa (document 2). One effect of his voyages was the making of a port city called Canton where the Portuguese, Dutch, and English merchants all traded with China. Unfortunately, after the death of Zheng He, the explorations ended due to it being too costly and then came the end of external trade after limiting contact with other places.

Although the large increase of silver flow into China was beneficial, it created harmful effects. The Chinese government during the 1570s required all domestic taxes and trade fees to be paid in silver; however, the increased flow of silver aided the people of China in following this rule set out by the Chinese government. As a Ming

In the early eighteen hundreds, Britain and other European countries demanded more and more Chinese commodities, especially tea and silk. However, only the port in Canton was opened to foreign countries, and Chinese would not take any other form of payments besides silver. The desire to make China into a free market that foreigners have more access to and the increasing, though illegal, European opium import to China eventually created tension between the European countries, especially Britain, and the Chinese government (Allingham Par. 1-2). The two battles fought and won by European powers were known as the Opium Wars. China’s politics, economy, and intellects were both positively and negatively

The main theme of 19th century was the imperialism expansion of western capitalistic industrial nations throughout the whole world. During this process, the conflicts between occidental imperialism powers and oriental countries never stopped. The First Opium War, well known as the Opium War, was the war that happened during September, 1839 to Autumn, 1842, between China and Britain. The war was initiated by the conflicts between China and Britain on the fact that some British merchants, who worked for the East India Company, smuggled opium to China and ignored Chinese laws. The mania of opium smoking shocked the Chinese government and triggered the anti-opium movement. Lin Zexu, a Chinese official known as Commissioner Lin, burned out the confiscated opium at Humen. During the war, China suffered great loss and ended up with a disastrous fiasco. The result was extremely humiliating to China and profoundly changed the fate of China: China was compelled to sign a series of unequal treaties, cede Hong Kong and compensate huge war indemnity. When I viewed this miserable history of China, a question was created in my mind. Considering the great power gap between the declining China and the rising Britain, what factors led the Chinese government to launch the anti-opium movement at the expense of triggering the Opium War? My answer is quite explicit: the

The main theme in the book Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman’s Journey Through Afghanistan the author discusses how, Opium Nation' joins the individual and the political with the characters of people and the personalities of countries utilizing journal and profoundly looked into reporting in a story that hopscotches around the globe to spare a kid in the present as it follows Nawa's youth and her outings to her country in the present day. Her own particular story is sufficiently frightening. As a young lady in a working class family in Afghanistan, she saw one of her colleagues slaughtered by a Soviet bomb. Her grandma evaded being shot by insignificant inches, and in the 1980's, the family fled conveying what they could on two jackasses over the Iranian fringe.

The First Opium War fought between Britain and China from 1839-1842 was a clash between two vastly different cultures, one struggling to control trade rights, and the other desperate to limit the impact of foreign trade upon the local population. The war changed the way China acted towards its foreign counterparts, exposed the weaknesses of the Chinese feudal system and forcefully opened-up China to the rest of the world. There were severe economic, social and political consequences that the war had on China.