JemmyOpium Wars hours!
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Meme Curator
PugJesushttps://media.piefed.social/posts/xA/hV/xAhV3MqpvkhuzRz.webp
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Explanation: In the mid-19th century, the British addiction to the dangerous drug known as ‘tea’ created a massive trade imbalance with Qing China. No, really. British taste for tea (and porcelain, and silk) caused an immense amount of silver to flow into China. Like any good merchant, the British simply figured out what good Qing China desired in turn in order to rectify this trade imbalance! Unfortunately, China had little interest in allowing British consumer goods into their markets, and Chinese elites had little taste for British artisan goods.
Luckily, the British stumbled on opium as a desirable trade good! And with their control over India, the Brits set to growing opium in massive amounts and flooding China’s markets with it!
For obvious reasons, when it became apparent that Britain was becoming the trashiest world empire and basing their trade relations on drug dealing, Qing China was not pleased, and restricted imports to destroy the opium trade, the abundance of which had caused opium addiction to become widespread by the drastic drop in price by the increased supply.
Britain did not like this, and decided war was an acceptable solution to keep drug dealing to the Chinese. They won. Twice. And extorted some exorbitant concessions in addition to guarantees for their drug trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
As an interesting additional detail, the maternal grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt made his fortune (a couple of times over) in the opium business in China, and later as a more ‘legit’ drug dealer to the US War department.
Warren Delano
“Skill issue”- Queen Victoria
Funny enough, one of the objections from the Chinese government to Queen Victoria before the war broke out was intercepted by British elites and never delivered, for fear that she might side with the Chinese over the British companies if she knew the full story.
Who knows if she actually would have, or how much influence she, as a constitutional monarch, would have been able to exercise over the war. But it is interesting that the prospect was considered a threat.
…
The “Empress of India”? Yeah, I’m sure she would have given a shit about the Chinese opinion /s
People are often very funny about what they choose to abandon their moral myopia over.
In any case, any potential opposition would probably have been more predicated on “Drug addiction bad”, as England itself was struggling with that at the time.