As its title suggests, Merchants of War and Peace brings into focus the roles of British private merchants in Canton and the knowledge they produced in the making of the First Opium War (1839–42). Song-Chuan Chen argues that the cause of the Opium War was not to be primarily found in the opium trade or the nineteenth-century expansion of the British empire. Instead, “the origin of the war was provided by the Warlike party of Canton” (p. 8). The pro-war merchants created an ever more negative conception of China during the 1830s in Canton, and they successfully lobbied for war in London by disseminating the image of China as an insular empire that had to be opened up by force. The war was fought on their behalf in defense of their interests. It was won based on the military intelligence they provided. A profit order that served them was established after the war to address their demands. By approaching the cause of the Opium War from the perspective of the merchants, Chen tries to make a case “that actors on the periphery greatly affected the fate of the metropolis and the empire” (p. 8).

Merchants of War and Peace raises a few very important points in the seven chapters that compose the body of the book. First, it presents a complex picture of British attitudes toward China and toward the war, especially in chapters 2 and 7. Even though the pro-war merchants in Canton and the English manufacturers and Whig politicians in alliance with them won the day by making the British imperialist war machine serve their purposes, anti-war campaigners, including pro-peace merchants and Christian moralists, had their voices heard in the public arena as well. In the end, it was the anti-war protesters who ensured that the war was remembered as the “Opium War” and became a synonym for national regret.

Second, chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on the Canton system, an institutional setting that grew rigid in the early nineteenth century. “It was the institution of the Canton one-port system—not China's ‘all under heaven’ (tianxia) ideology nor the tributary system, as scholars have wrongly argued, that dictated the Qing's relations with and knowledge of Europeans, especially the British” (p. 5). Chen painstakingly shows that British merchants in Canton successfully broke the “soft borders” that the Qing designed to constrain flows of information, and they gathered valuable intelligence on Qing maritime defense that was put to good use by the British expedition force; the Qing, on the other hand, increasingly viewed the foreigners only from the perspective of containing them in Canton.

Third, this book foregrounds the interrelated issues of linguistic translation and conceptual transformation. In chapter 5, Chen traces how the Qing gradually replaced xiyang ren (West ocean people) with yi (strangers) as the main linguistic code used to refer to the Europeans, which accompanied the growing Sino-Western tensions in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the British side, a “war of words” over whether yi should be translated as “strangers” or “barbarians” helped sway public opinions toward the war.

Fourth, the questions of the shifting and contested meanings of “national interest” and “national honor” occupy a central place in Chen's discussion of the roots and aftermaths of the war, especially in chapters 6 and 8. British understandings of the nature and effects of the war depended on how they perceived the identity of the British empire, as a nation of trade or a professed Christian people; being forced to leave behind the profit order that primarily benefited dynastic state security, Qing China joined a new profit order that, while dominated by Western rules, was not necessarily harmful for the interests of Chinese merchants.

Addressing big themes with meticulous research primarily based on newspapers and legislative debates, Merchants of War and Peace gives us a riveting narrative of how Canton and the private merchants in Canton became key players in Sino-Western relations and in British empire-building. Chen joins efforts with such scholars as Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, Gregory Blue, Pär Cassel, Teemu Ruskola, Li Chen, Anne Reinhardt, Jenny Day, and Maria Adele Carrai in the ongoing debate over China's engagement with the expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the primary concerns I have with the general approach and arguments of this book is its overemphasis on how the motivations and activities of a particular group of people, British merchants in China, shaped the historical trajectory of Sino-British relations. Research published in the last two decades has persuasively demonstrated the indispensable roles of other factors, such as Euro-American discourse of Chinese legal despotism and the incommensurability between Sinocentric and Eurocentric international orders, in Sino-Western disputes of this period. In fact, Chen's analysis often implies that the Warlike party's manipulation and lobbying succeeded at this specific historical conjuncture in the form of the “Opium War” mostly because of the combination of multiple factors that can be better studied, as many scholars have done, over the longue durée. None of these observations, however, diminish this book's substantial contribution to the field. Bringing valuable new perspectives, Merchants of War and Peace should be read by everyone seeking to understand the Opium War and the pivotal changes that occurred in Sino-Western relations in the mid-nineteenth century.