The Opium War once ranked among the most studied events in Chinese history. In English alone, it inspired monographs by Hsin-pao Chang (1964), Frederic Wakeman (1966), and James Polachek (1992), as well as a translation-based classic by Arthur Waley (1958).Footnote 9 Yet even as historical interest in opium as a commodity and narcotic has increased in past decades, that in the events of 1839–42 and their consequences has notably declined. This is surely due to skepticism among Western historians of the once-prominent thesis that the war marked the first in a series of cascading crises that triggered the collapse of “traditional” China and thus could be seen as the inaugural event in its “modern” history.
Julia Lovell suggests two compelling reasons to return attention to this conflict. First, coverage of the war in English has surprising lacunae. Although specialized studies abound, she notes that “[a]t the time of writing, there was (to my knowledge) no book-length account of the first Opium War in English that made use of both anglophone accounts and the large collections of Chinese sources compiled and published in the 1990s” (p. 16). And, while the Opium War has largely yielded the prominent position it once held in English-language scholarship, Lovell is equally correct that it still looms large in Chinese academic, and especially popular and propagandistic, understandings of the emergence of modern China as a response to imperialism.
A particular concern with the present significance of the conflict guides the parameters of this study. Three hundred sixty pages of main text are divided into an introduction and nineteen chapters. The first five chapters rehearse the history of the opium trade and the coming of the war, followed by nine narrating its course up to the Treaty of Nanjing. The final five offer a political and cultural history of the war's legacy: chapter 15 deals with the second Opium War of 1856–60; chapter 16 considers the role of opium in Western perceptions of China, particularly “Yellow Peril” paranoia; chapter 17 analyzes opinions on opium in late Qing and Republican China, with an emphasis on opium's role in political debates; chapter 18 considers policy and attitudes toward opium in the Republican and Communist revolutions; and chapter 19 reviews the role of the Opium War in the China of recent decades. Lovell tackles the legacy of the war in the broadest terms possible, pausing along the way to introduce, sometimes in detail, a cast that includes Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, and Sax Rohmer.
If one leitmotif predominates within Lovell's narrative, it is her view that Guomindang propaganda in the 1920s is principally responsible for transforming the war in Chinese memory from a “side-story” into a “unprecedented national tragedy” (p. 320), with the PRC completing the “job of demonizing the Opium War” begun by the Nationalist “official history industry” (p. 329). This turn has played itself out again in miniature over the past three decades, Lovell argues, as the Communist government reinvested after 1989 in an Opium War-centered propaganda narrative that she judges to have been largely running out of steam before that fateful year.
In recounting the Opium War itself, Lovell keeps fairly close to the main theaters of action and a narrative of the conflict already well-established in secondary literature. It is indicative of her effort to locate the war in modern Chinese history in the broadest possible sense that (according to the index) she finds room for fourteen references to Taiwan, but not once refers to the island during the Opium War itself, when it was home to more than 150 Indian and European prisoners whose mass execution in 1842 was certainly the single largest loss of British subjects in the conflict.
Lovell has written a popular history for readers possessing little or no familiarity with modern Chinese history. As befits this genre, its footnotes reveal a preponderance of secondary scholarship over primary research, a characteristic even more pronounced in Chinese than in English. To give the example of chapter 14, on the Treaty of Nanjing, there are by this reviewer's count seventy-four individual citations spread across sixty-eight footnotes (pp. 400–402). Of these, more than half come from just two secondary sources: sixteen references to contemporary scholar Mao Haijian's study, and fully twenty-five to Ssu-yü Têng's 1944 Chang Hsi and the Treaty of Nanking, 1842. Lovell graciously acknowledges that “my understanding and analysis of primary Chinese sources on the Opium War were greatly helped by reference to Mao Haijian's Tianchao de bengkui and its guidance concerning Chinese archival materials for the war” (p. 442). In chapter 14, the only Chinese primary source cited is the Yapian zhanzheng dang'an shiliao; it is referenced ten times, and eight of those citations, by my count, also occur in Mao's book. One wishes she had gone somewhat farther afield in her use of Chinese primary sources.
Lovell is certainly correct that the Opium War, as an event in the round, has been curiously neglected in Western scholarship. Hers is indeed the only book-length general history of the conflict in English by an author directly consulting both Chinese and Western sources. One hopes that it inspires researchers to ponder whether rich veins of ore may not still lie in a topic that has yet to be thoroughly mined, and interested nonacademic readers to move deeper into the classics of the specialist literature.
