A Study Of Sino-British Relations 1800-1850

From the late 18th century to the first half of the 19th century,Britain sent two missions to China in an unsuccessful attempt to make a breakthrough in Sino-British trade relations and diplomatic ties,after which trade conflicts between Britain and China intensified until the outbreak of the Opium Wars in 1840,when Britain finally opened the Chinese market by force.Sir George Thomas Staunton(1781-1859,also known as Sir Staunton Jr.)played an important role in this Sino-British engagement.He was a member of two missions to China,as a boy-in-waiting on the Macartney mission in 1792 and as deputy envoy on the Amherst mission in 1816,and worked for over ten years for the East India Company in Canton,where he presided over affairs with China and published several China-related translations and monographs on his return to England.In 1840,Staunton Jr.delivered a speech in the House of Commons on the war with China in support of the then Foreign Secretary Henry John Temple Palmerston(1784-1865),the then Foreign Secretary,eventually pushed Parliament to pass a decision to continue the war with China.Most scholarship on Staunton has focused on his two missions to China and his translation of the Ta Tsing Leu Lee,but in fact there is less research on Staunton’s perception of China,which underwent a significant change and directly influenced British policy in the first half of the 19th century.Through his eight books and speeches in Parliament,it is clear that Staunton Jr.was not only close to Robert Morrison(1782-1834),a missionary to China in the early 19th century,and John Francis Davis(1795-1890),a British diplomat before and after the Opium War,but also active in promoting Chinese studies in Britain,and is therefore considered by some researchers to be an early British sinologist.It was his own experiences in China,his interactions with China,and his close observations of China that formed the basis of his perceptions of China.As a result,Staunton Jr.made a number of proposals on China in the British Parliament that were later considered forward-looking and somewhat feasible,which in turn allowed his perception of China to influence parliamentary decisions to a certain extent,and hence Sino-British relations.Staunton Jr.himself was active at a time when the Second British Empire was coming to its peak,when the rise of free trade thinking and the imminent completion of the Industrial Revolution were affecting British attitudes to civilisation and the world,to the question of colonies,and to the relationship between overseas trade and colonial expansion,By this time Britain had moved from the 17th century emphasis on colonial expansion to an emphasis on overseas trade and strategic expansion.As trade with the East developed,Britain’s trade with China and India became increasingly important in British trade,and trade between Britain and China became an important part of the East India Company’s Eastern trade strategy,with the tea trade and opium trade bringing huge profits to the East India Company in the past.But the vast market in Chinese mainland and the Qing dynasty’s insistence on the’Canton single-port system’ severely restricted the East India Company’s expansion into China.It was clear that Canton alone could no longer satisfy the East India Company’s trading needs,and the British government’s two official contacts with the Qing court,both of which were unsuccessful,led to a change in the image of China in British society.It was against this background and social trend that Staunton Jr.grew up to become a British ’China expert’.The central question of this study is how did Staunton’s perception of China change between 1800 and 1850?How did this shift affect Sino-British relations during that period?The author intends to analyse these two major questions from the perspective of civil izational history through the writings and speeches of Staunton Jr.and other relevant materials,especially the archives he donated to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland after his death.In my view,Staunton’s perception of China between 1800 and 1850 underwent three major shifts.The first shift was from civilisation to barbarism.In his early years,Staunton regarded China as a civilised country,but after 1836,he gradually regarded China as a backward and barbaric country.He previously considered China’s laws and technology comparable to those of European countries,and even considered them worthy of learning from Europe,but later criticised China for violating international law,violating the natural rights of human beings,and not having science in the modern sense.The second shift was from peace to war.Before 1838,Staunton Jr.had long insisted on peaceful diplomacy and had called for peace in the British Parliament,but after witnessing the intensification of the Sino-British trade conflict over the "smoking ban",he began to call for the opening of the Chinese market by force.Thirdly,there was a shift from being an opium dealer to opposing the opium trade.Previously labelled as an ’opium spokesman’,Staunton’s attitude towards the trade changed dramatically,initially avoiding it,but after 1840 he became firmly opposed to it,arguing that it was criminal and that Britain’s maintenance of it would only damage Britain’s national honour.He even proposed a concrete plan to increase the tea trade and on this basis to restructure the perverse structure of Britain’s trade with China so as to ensure the long-term development of Sino-British trade.These triple shifts make Staunton Jr.’s formulation of the China issue seem inconsistent and contradictory,but when placed in a specific historical context,one can see the changing trajectory of Staunton Jr.’s dialogue perceptions and their internal logic.On the whole,Staunton Jr.,who ran for the House of Commons several times,was both a direct participant in Victorian British politics and a personal witness to Sino-British relations in the first half of the nineteenth century,and his views on China were not only realistic and forward-looking,but also influenced parliamentary decisions on China to some extent.However,it should also be noted that Staunton’s perceptions of China were inevitably influenced by the times and showed inconsistencies,which is the main source of the mixed academic assessments of Staunton and the multiple images of Staunton that have been constructed.