East India Company

"The East India Company's food ship Lord Amherst had docked at Shanghai in 1832 with members of a trade mission eager to buy tea and silk in exchange for their own piece-goods and opium. They were given a cold reception by officials acting on imperial orders. The opium clippers continued to establish smuggling bases at Lintin Island, off Canton, and other strategic centres like Hong Kong. The authorities had finally raided warehouses on Lintin and boarded several armed junks waiting offshore to take the drug in. They seized and burned twenty thousand chests worth upwards of £2 million. (Some outraged shippers valued their losses as high as £5 million.) It was the long-expected, and not unwelcome, signal for British warships to come to the aid of all honest merchants in the sacred name of free trade. They demolished the weak Chinese forces in an operation which would pay the plumpest of dividends for a full century."

"Arab traders first introduced opium to the Chinese as a specific for gastric disorders and an antidote to leprosy. Portuguese seamen of the seventeenth century had then given the mandarins and a few rich officials a fashionable taste for yang yien (foreign smoke). With rapid national addiction, the drug developed into one of the East India Company's most profitable commodities. It became a very convenient medium of exchange when the Company began buying more tea and silk from the Cantonese who insisted on being paid in silver. Since exports of cotton could not balance the trade, opium was the only answer. The Imperial Government seemed less concerned with the growth of the habit than the huge silver drain to pay for it. They retaliated half-heartedly with an ineffectual ban on imports."

"India had grown raw cotton for centuries, using hand-looms for her local needs. The development of spinning in Lancashire created a keener demand, but transport to the coast was mainly by bullock carts over bad roads. Cleaning and ginning remained primitive. The cotton was often stored in pits plastered with cow-dung, although the East India Company had bought gins from the United States to improve cleansing."