Historians of ideas are wary about the concept of diffusion, especially of diffusion across national borders. In the past, many relied on the assumption that ideas spread through their own power of persuasion and were merely adopted and rehearsed by disciples. The traditional historiography of free trade in the nineteenth century is a case in point. Free trade was viewed as the offspring of classical political economy, and its diffusion from Britain to Western Europe and the wider world was described as an abstract and self-sustained phenomenon.Footnote 1 More recent works have warned us that diffusion or dissemination was in fact a more complex process and that persuasion required substantial reformulation. The spread of free trade within early nineteenth-century British society, for example, owed a great deal to the religious reinterpretation of market laws by ‘evangelical’ Christians.Footnote 2 Free trade continued to dominate Victorian and Edwardian politics because it was closely tied with other ‘liberal’ values such as national liberty, social justice, and international peace.Footnote 3 But how free trade ideas spread in practice around the globe in the mid-nineteenth century has received comparatively little attention.Footnote 4
The extraordinary career of John Bowring (1792–1872), author, editor, and Board of Trade official, may illustrate several key aspects of that process of global dissemination. Bowring was an indefatigable and cosmopolitan propagator of free trade.Footnote 5 In the aftermath of the 1830 Revolution in France, he toured dozens of cities there in the hope of making free trade ‘vibrate’ and spread like a ‘fire’ in public opinion.Footnote 6 He later participated in the foundation of the Anti-Corn Law League in Manchester and propounded free trade policies in Bern, Rome, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Batavia (Jakarta), Bangkok, and Shanghai. In 1856, as British plenipotentiary in the Far East, he ordered the bombardment of Canton to enforce the rights of foreign merchants to enter the city. The decision triggered the Arrow War (1856–60), eventually resulting in Ch'ing China's full opening to Western trade.
Bowring's endeavours demonstrate that the global dissemination of free trade was an eminently practical process that required deliberate agency and material support from institutions. His extraordinary mobility, his capacity to harangue foreign merchants and journalists, and the generous salaries paid to him by the British government were important factors – possibly more important than the intellectual impact of international trade theory – in the spread of liberal ideas about trade. He collected information or proselytized in more than thirty countries on three continents, and authored or edited more than forty works, consisting primarily of translations, reports on foreign trade policies, travel accounts, and pamphlets concerned with the international circulation of commodities, ideas, and individuals.Footnote 7 As befits such a global career, his papers are scattered among more than fifteen archive depositories in Europe and North America.Footnote 8 This article uses relevant material from nine of these depositories to retrace his efforts in Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.
The global reach of Bowring's labours also suggests a greater continuity than is usually recognized between the rise of liberal ideas about trade in Europe and their forceful implementation in the extra-European world.Footnote 9 Dissemination entailed reformulation in accordance with political and cultural contexts. In Western Europe, Bowring used a politically liberal rhetoric to woo public opinion. In less liberal countries such as Germany and Egypt, he sought to persuade absolute rulers and civil servants of the benefits of freer international communications. And in East Asia, he embraced ‘gunboat diplomacy’ to obtain the lifting of restrictions on foreign trade. ‘Qui veut la fin veut les moyens’, Bowring quipped to his adversaries, in Europe as well as in Asia. He resorted to different means in different circumstances. Yet his goal was everywhere the removal of international trade barriers.
After examining Bowring's attempt to convert French public opinion to free trade in the early 1830s, the article considers his activities as a commercial diplomat in Europe and Egypt between 1835 and 1841. It then analyses how Bowring, in the 1840s and during his consulship at Canton between 1849 and 1852, gradually endorsed the growth of British informal and formal power overseas in order to promote free trade outside Europe. Finally, it shows how his assertive or ‘imperialist’ policies as plenipotentiary in the Far East in the 1850s remained grounded in his dedication to the creation of a global market rather than a desire for territorial expansion.
I
Bowring made his first sustained attempt to spread free trade in France between 1831 and 1834. Like many radicals across Europe, he had welcomed the advent of the July Monarchy in 1830 as an important victory over reactionary forces. Commissioned by the British government to discuss a trade agreement with French authorities, he did not confine himself to conventional commercial negotiations, striving instead to secure the support of public opinion for reform. By 1835, an employee of the French customs administration in Marseilles complained that Bowring's exertions had thrown the kingdom in a state of ‘turmoil’, which might bring down the recently enthroned King Louis-Philippe and shatter ‘the peace of Europe’.Footnote 10
Bowring's abilities and talents fully justified his appointment as trade negotiator with the new regime in France.Footnote 11 An international merchant born to a Unitarian family of cloth tradesmen near Exeter in 1792, he had forged numerous connections with liberals on the Continent, especially in Spain and France. He had made a name for himself on the London literary scene as a translator of foreign poetry, and he spoke fluently a dozen European languages, including French. Bowring was also a prominent radical activist and publicist. In the early 1820s, he had served as foreign secretary of the Society for Universal Peace and as secretary of the Greek Committee, established by British Philhellenes to support Greek independence. One of Jeremy Bentham's closest collaborators since 1820, he had edited several of the philosopher's works, including Bentham's main tract in favour of free trade, the Observations on the restrictive and prohibitory commercial system (1821). It was even, Bowring later claimed, his own description of the effects of trade restrictions on the Continent that had inspired Bentham to write this scathing condemnation of protectionist policies as ‘always either useless or mischievous’.Footnote 12 In 1824, Bentham had appointed Bowring political editor of the utilitarian Westminster Review. This journal – co-edited after 1829 by Thomas Perronet Thompson, the author of the widely circulated Catechism on the corn laws (1826) – relentlessly advocated the abolition of trade restrictions in Britain and the rest of the world.Footnote 13
Bowring wished to serve as trade commissioner in order to propound free trade in France, but also because he saw public employment as a solution to his financial problems. In 1827, his firm had gone bankrupt, leaving him unable to sustain his large family – he had eight children – for several years. After the Whigs returned to power in November 1830, he became commissioner of accounts and went to the Continent to complete two reports on the Dutch and French systems of public accounts. While in Paris in the spring of 1831, he suggested to Baron Louis, the French minister of finance, the opening of commercial negotiations with Britain as a means to reform the highly restrictive French customs regime. Louis took up the proposal and the British government agreed to set up in Paris a mixed commission, which would recommend mutually beneficial modifications of the two countries' tariffs. The Board of Trade appointed Bowring as one of the two British representatives in the commission.Footnote 14 His colleague was George Villiers (later 4th earl of Clarendon), a young Whig aristocrat and commissioner of customs, who would remain a lifelong friend and patron of Bowring.
These commercial negotiations were, in part, a Benthamite undertaking. Bowring owed his appointment to Charles Poulett Thomson, the vice-president of the Board of Trade and an admirer of Bentham. Villiers had moved in utilitarian circles at Cambridge in the late 1810s and had later received private lessons of political economy by John Ramsay MacCulloch, David Ricardo's disciple.Footnote 15 The late 1820s had seen the intensification of protests against high tariffs in France, especially in winegrowing regions – a development observed with satisfaction by the Westminster Review.Footnote 16 This growing popularity of liberal ideas about international trade, combined with the advent of a liberal regime after the July Revolution, created reasonable expectations of a thorough liberalization of France's commercial policy. In order to accelerate such a change, Bowring and his allies transposed the methods employed by Benthamites to propagate their ideas in Britain across the Channel.Footnote 17 More specifically, following Bentham's recommendations in the Observations on the commercial restrictive and prohibitory system, Bowring organized several ‘efficient counter-influences’ to fight off the pressures exerted by protectionist interests: the press, which ought to defend the ‘universal interest’ of consumers, and lobbies representing export-oriented industries (wine and silk in the French case).Footnote 18
Negotiations began in December 1831. But Bowring and Villiers soon became frustrated by the ill-will of their French counterparts. In particular, French officials maintained that the persistence of popular Anglophobic prejudice made significant reductions in the French tariff impossible. To overcome that obstacle, Bowring offered in April 1832 to tour the French provinces and enlighten opinion on the potential benefits of freer commercial intercourse with Britain. The French government acquiesced and accorded Bowring letters of introduction to local prefects and chambers of commerce. During his tours, Bowring kept ‘two things … constantly in view’: first, ‘the formation of a sound opinion through the press’, which would uphold the consumers' interest, and, secondly, the publication, by chambers of commerce or ad hoc commercial bodies, of ‘Representations demanding a Reform of the whole commercial system’ on behalf of export-oriented industries.Footnote 19
Bowring made three such tours between 1832 and 1834, focusing on seaports and the silk and wine-producing regions. In April and May 1832, he visited the Rhône valley (Lyons, Saint-Etienne, Grenoble, Avignon, Marseilles). Between March and May 1833, he exercised his talents in the south-west (Bordeaux, Angoulême, Rochefort, La Rochelle, Angers), Brittany (Nantes, Morlaix, Brest, Saint-Brieuc), and Normandy (Caen, Le Havre, Rouen). His third tour between August and October 1834 took him to Champagne (Reims, Epernay, Châlons, Troyes), Burgundy (Dijon, Nuits, Beaune, Mâcon), again Lyons and Marseilles, Languedoc (Montpellier, Carcassonne, Toulouse), and again the south-west (Bayonne and Bordeaux). In each town, Bowring spent between a couple of days and one month, meeting with scores of merchants, manufacturers, local political leaders, journalists, and even canuts (silk-workers) in Lyons. His expectations were particularly high with regard to Bordeaux, the centre of anti-protectionist agitation on behalf of trade and the wine industry in the late 1820s. There, he wanted to ‘make a Carolina on the other side of the Loire’: he was alluding to the ‘nullification crisis’ of 1828–33, whereby South Carolina refused to implement the so-called tariff of abominations, forcing a reduction in import duties on the United States federal government. For his part, Thomson expected no less from Bowring, indicating that if his agent did not ‘in the course of a few weeks set Guienne into a South Carolina fire’, he would ‘not [be] satisfied’.Footnote 20
Soon after arriving in the Gironde seaport in March 1833, Bowring reported that all went ‘exceedingly well’ and that there would be ‘a capital explosion’. His room was ‘crowded from morning to night’ by conservative and progressive Orléanistes, republicans and Saint-Simonians, journalists, and vineyard proprietors. All wanted to ascertain that the British government had ‘no sinister object’ in promoting free trade. Bowring strove to convince them that the opening of French trade would primarily benefit France and, above all, French wine exports. He also helped local notables to set up two bodies, a ‘commercial commission’ comprising Bordeaux's leading merchants and a ‘committee of vineyard proprietors’. The two bodies were not only responsible for making ‘representations to the government’ on commercial policy, but also for ‘taking hold of the subject – & (in a word) popularising it by their appeal to public opinion’.Footnote 21 The British consul in Bordeaux confirmed to the Foreign Office that Bowring's mission had created ‘the greatest interest’ among ‘the inhabitants of this part of France’, who would henceforth support ‘most energetically’ the lowering of French tariffs.Footnote 22 ‘Well done thou Prince of Agitation’, Villiers congratulated his colleague.Footnote 23
Bowring's tours conformed to a deliberate strategy of irradiation. In each town he attempted ‘to gather up the elements & form a nucleus’ of supporters, and he kept up ‘a tremendous correspondence’ with his followers in order ‘to direct … all the elements over France to a common end’, namely ‘the overthrow of the monopolists’. Bowring's converts to free trade were to disseminate liberal commercial ideas and win over public opinion: ‘opinion – enlightened opinion – is the great instrument for carrying our object – without this we should have made no progress here – with it we shall carry everything’, he wrote to Lord Auckland, the president of the Board of Trade.Footnote 24 Enlisting support from the press, local and national, was another important strategy. ‘There are 16 newspapers on the ground over which I have gone’, he wrote to Villiers towards the end of his second tour, and ‘there is not one of them that has not published several hearty articles in condemnation of the protecting system.’ In Paris, too, he secured the backing of the main liberal dailies and concluded ‘that except the notoriously paid & prostitute newspapers, – there is not one which is not our ally’. Bowring himself did not apparently employ bribes in his dealings with journalists, relying only on persuasion and ‘a few dinners judiciously given’.Footnote 25
Bowring's campaign shows that the dissemination of free trade relied on practical efforts as well as the intellectual persuasiveness of abstract theory. Tellingly, Bowring used concrete images inspired by the diffusion of sound to describe the results of his exertions. Writing to Thomson in January 1833, for example, he ventured that ‘by & by we shall have Lyons & Bordeaux echoing each others’ voices loudly enough to produce some vibration in Paris', and, elsewhere, that ‘the growl grows louder & louder’.Footnote 26 He also likened himself to an incendiary, reporting that ‘the fire spreads & will spread’. The language of dissemination employed by Bowring sometimes verged on the supernatural, as revealed by his report to Villiers: ‘You have no idea what a mighty influence is awakened and how the holy spirit is spreading.’Footnote 27
The tone of Bowring's correspondence leaves little doubt as to his sincerity and determination. ‘I scarcely ever get to bed till 3 in the morning’, he wrote to Thomson, ‘& never go to any place of amusement – or to any place but to advance over objects to which I am bound by flesh-blood-brains and every thought & feeling.’Footnote 28 Bowring was, however, a mercenary as well as a missionary. He repeatedly complained about the low level of his remuneration in the period before May 1832 and threatened ‘to throw up the matter in disgust’ if his salary was not augmented. ‘[H]ow should I find zeal or spirits to proceed’, he asked Thomson, ‘when I find my exertions so meanly estimated?’Footnote 29 Bowring eventually consented to stay in France on the following terms: a £500 annual salary, a living allowance of £3.3s. per day, a travel allowance of 2s. per mile, and the payment of all his expenses. The allowances and the expenses were no small complement to the salary: over the first six months of 1833, for instance, they amounted to £885.3s.Footnote 30 Bowring and Villiers also received £500 for a first report on Franco-British commercial relations in 1834, and Bowring £500 for a second report in 1835.Footnote 31
Bowring was aware that he was paid for ‘opening the continental markets to English industry’. Or, as he put it to Lord Auckland: ‘I did not come here [in France] to pocket the public money for doing nothing – or nothing that was worthy of my recompense.’Footnote 32 Bowring's desire to justify his salary often led him to exaggerate the success of his campaign: ‘this monstrous system of prohibition is tottering’, he boasted to Thomson in 1832, and ‘the power of English influence’, he wrote to Auckland in 1834, ‘only requires to be watched & encouraged – & you will see it break down all the Customs House barriers [of France]’.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, his campaign provoked a significant political crisis. In January 1834, the Bordeaux commercial commission issued a solemn Adresse calling for the completion of the 1830 Revolution and the application of the ‘liberal principle’ to economic, as well as to political, institutions.Footnote 34 According to Bowring, ‘no document ever produced a greater sensation in the commercial and commercio-political world’. In the following weeks, numerous chambers of commerce or commercial commissions adhered to the manifesto, while the entire press was ‘balking out in its praise’.Footnote 35 In a second petition, invoking the example of South Carolina, the committee of the Gironde vineyard proprietors threatened the government with commercial secession.Footnote 36
The French government partly gave in to the pressure. In April 1834, the protectionist minister of commerce, Adolphe Thiers, resigned and his successor issued an ordinance relaxing trade restrictions on imports of cotton yarns, coal and woollen textiles – three key British export articles. Triumphant, Bowring wished to transform support for commercial reform into a political force: ‘non-resistance at least to the Free Trade principle must be the condition of existence for any [French] ministry’. He encouraged the formation of an electoral committee in Bordeaux, which aimed to secure between 60 and 120 seats at the forthcoming general election in June 1834. Such a tactic foreshadowed the one pursued by the British Anti-Corn Law League in the 1840s. The committee's influence proved limited to the Bordeaux area, but Bowring deemed the results of the election satisfactory: the elected Gironde deputies formed ‘a compact nucleus of commercial reformers’.Footnote 37 In the autumn of 1834, Perronet Thompson, the other editor of the Westminster Review, spent more than a month in France, partly to assist Bowring. The two British radicals plotted several manoeuvres to bolster commercial reform, including the drafting of a petition on behalf of French workers: ‘Respecting the ouvriers’, Thompson wrote to Bowring, ‘I think between us we can indite a petition for them.’Footnote 38 Although the plan was abandoned, Thompson wrote, with a French aide, a Contre-enquête that featured a lively dialogue between English and French characters, highlighting the benefits of freer commercial intercourse for French consumers. The pamphlet was printed, but not circulated by the publisher, perhaps at the request of the French government.Footnote 39
The growing hostility of French authorities to Bowring's campaign testified to its impact. When Bowring returned from his second tour to Paris in June 1833, Thiers, still minister of commerce, met with the British commissioner and heaped reproaches on him. He said, Bowring later recounted, that ‘I had insurrectionized the south – crushed (écrasé) his ministère with representations – inflamed the popular passions – that I ought to have been ejected by an Alien Bill.’ To which tirade Bowring retorted: ‘Qui veut la fin veut les moyens & that as our end was great – so were our means.’Footnote 40 Numerous other testimonies, some unexpected, bear out Bowring's claims that his campaign was exceptionally successful. In January 1834, the future figurehead of German protectionism, Friedrich List, congratulated Bowring ‘on the great success [he] had in France’. List disagreed with Bowring's goals, but admired his capacity to mobilize public opinion.Footnote 41 The British ambassador in Paris, Lord Granville, reported in February 1834 ‘that the unremitting exertions of Bowring have had most extraordinary success – the Press both Parisian and Provincial has answered to his will’.Footnote 42 In the following years, opponents to reform often recalled Bowring's part in stirring up the controversy over trade policy. In 1835, an anonymous Montpellier pamphleteer asserted that since ‘Monsieur Bowring set foot on our soil’, ‘maritime chambers of commerce’ and ‘parasitical consumers’ had become ‘more English than Ireland’.Footnote 43 During a parliamentary debate on customs legislation in April 1836, a conservative deputy regretted that Bowring had not been ‘lapidated’ while he toured French provincial towns.Footnote 44
Yet Bowring's campaign floundered in the winter of 1834–5, and the Board of Trade recalled him to London. At a public inquiry on commercial legislation organized by the government, French manufacturers lambasted cries for ‘commercial freedom’ as English-inspired propaganda and further reform projects were abandoned.Footnote 45 In subsequent years, protectionist lobbies regained the support of public opinion by portraying free trade as an ‘English’ doctrine and its French supporters as traitors. Bowring himself briefly returned to Paris in the autumn of 1835, but found conditions in France no longer ‘auspicious’ for promoting free trade, due to an effervescence of ‘anti-English feeling’.Footnote 46 The effects of Bowring's campaign were nonetheless remarkable. In the short run, he admittedly strengthened the protectionists' hand by making free trade appear as an ‘English’, hence suspicious, idea. In the long run, however, the pressures exercised by Bordeaux and Lyons facilitated the liberalization of French trade policy by Napoleon III in the 1850s. The leading French free traders of the Second Empire, such as the silk merchant François-Barthélémy Arlès-Dufour, had often been Bowring's allies in the early 1830s.Footnote 47 His mission between 1831 and 1834 durably helped to shape both free trade and protectionist opinion in nineteenth-century France.Footnote 48 The British government was impressed by the impact of Bowring's exertions and soon assigned him new missions in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.
II
Between 1835 and 1840, Bowring successively promoted free trade in Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, and Germany. As in France, he wished to persuade his foreign interlocutors that trade liberalization would benefit their country as well as Britain. But since he could not address public opinion in the illiberal regimes of Italy, Egypt, and Germany, he focused his efforts on absolute rulers and bureaucrats. Yet he eschewed traditional commercial diplomacy, based on reciprocal exchanges of exclusive advantages, and instead advocated unilateral tariff reform. He became, in the description of Lord Melbourne, the Whig prime minister, a ‘commercial knight-errand’.Footnote 49 At the same time, Bowring remained a mercenary, who hoped to check the industrial progress of Britain's potential rivals by bolstering local agricultural interests.
Bowring owed his new assignments to a powerful patron and staunch defender of British interests overseas: Lord Palmerston. Although the Whig foreign secretary distrusted Bowring's political opinions, he admired both his success in igniting controversy in France and the quality of his commercial reports.Footnote 50 In 1835, Bowring wished to go to Spain, where, as in France, he hoped to ‘bring sound notions and sound political economy from the [agrarian] south to bear upon and ultimately to break the protecting & prohibitory system of the [industrial] north’. Yet Palmerston elected to send Bowring to Switzerland to study ‘the commercial relations of that country & their bearing on the Prussian system’ or German Zollverein, founded in 1834.Footnote 51 Bowring spent six weeks in the Swiss confederacy. On his return, he compiled a reassuring report that lauded the high level of prosperity achieved by the Swiss cantons ‘without customs houses to exclude or laws to prohibit the full action of foreign competition’ and hailed their unwillingness to join the Zollverein.Footnote 52 The following year, Palmerston commissioned Bowring to go to Italy, where he was active between October 1836 and January 1837, mostly in Tuscany and Rome. In Florence, Bowring established good relations with the grand-duke and his prime minister, who both indicated a commitment to the traditionally liberal commercial policies of Tuscany. His interviews with Roman officials were, however, less satisfactory. At his audience with Gregory XVI, he found that the ‘Holy Father [was] not bright in matters of trade’ and tried in vain to dispel the pope's fears that Britain may ‘oppress other countries by getting all commerce to herself’.Footnote 53 Accordingly, Bowring's official report contrasted the prosperity of liberal Tuscany with the decaying economy of the prohibitive Pontifical States.Footnote 54
In September 1837, Palmerston assigned Bowring a more ambitious mission to Egypt. His agent was to ascertain the political and commercial intentions of the pasha Muhammad Ali, a nominal vassal of the Ottoman empire but in practice the absolute ruler of Egypt and Syria. The British government feared Muhammad Ali's projects of aggrandizement at Turkish expense, and disapproved of his policy of industrial independence, which combined heavy taxes on European imports and state monopolies for manufactured products.Footnote 55 Bowring reached Alexandria in November 1837 and stayed in Cairo for several months. In frequent interviews with Muhammad Ali, he tried to convince him that ‘he had far better export his raw produce to Europe & receive our manufactures than continue a system which is both costly & pernicious’. Muhammad Ali agreed to establish a free trade in corn and to ‘put an end to more than thirty monopolies’. But he breathed an atmosphere ‘polluted by the sinister influences of those who profit by his mistaken policies’ and resisted Bowring's other demands.Footnote 56 Bowring also explored Palestine and Syria before returning to England through Constantinople and Vienna. In his reports on Egypt and Syria, he denounced the irrationality of Muhammad Ali's industrializing policies, highlighted the region's potential for the production of raw materials, and insisted on its strategic importance for British trade.Footnote 57 Yet Palmerston deleted passages sympathetic to the pasha from the original reports, such as a quotation from Muhammad Ali claiming that he ‘never began a war without great repugnance’, but warning that he had always been ‘a successful warrior’.Footnote 58 Such assertions were at odds with the foreign secretary's intention to rein in Egyptian nationalism. In 1840, the British navy blockaded Alexandria, and the treaty of London in 1841 forced Muhammad Ali to withdraw from Syria and to fix import duties at 3 per cent ad valorem.Footnote 59
In July 1839, Palmerston commissioned Bowring to attend the imminent meeting of the Zollverein's deputies in Berlin.Footnote 60 The foreign secretary requested his agent to try and induce delegates ‘to take a more liberal view of the intercourse’ between the German states and Britain.Footnote 61 Bowring was warmly received by the Prussian high society. Friedrich List later recalled how educated Berliners expected his arrival as if the British agent were ‘a second Fanny Eisler [a famous ballet dancer], a second Franz Liszt, indeed a sort of commercial saviour’.Footnote 62 Bowring's dispatches from Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and Frankfurt were nonetheless alarming. The Zollverein tended to shelter German industries from foreign competition and had unleashed a ‘manufacturing mania’. Such developments harmed German interests by forcing ‘much capital into false and improductive channels’, but they also meant ‘that unless measures are speedily taken to direct towards liberalism the machinery of the Zoll Verein – it will become a fearful instrument for the gradual exclusion of all British manufactures from Germany’. He found, however, some allies amongst the ‘Prussian functionaries’, who were ‘incomparably the most advanced in matters of political economy’ and who defeated attempts by representatives of southern German states to increase the union's tariff further.Footnote 63 In his official report, Bowring argued for the rapid repeal of the British Corn Laws to reinforce the German agricultural interest and incite the Zollverein to lower its trade barriers on manufactured products.Footnote 64
Bowring's missions in 1835–9 were remunerated at the same generous rate as his French commission. His salary for his labours in the Middle East, for instance, amounted to £965.15s and his expenses and allowance – for 361 days spent abroad and 9,938 miles travelled – to £2,240.19s. (‘Pretty well I think’, a Treasury official commented, in the margin of a statement recapitulating the payments made to Bowring between 1837 and 1840.) Bowring also received £500 for each of his five commercial reports.Footnote 65 In July 1840, Benjamin Disraeli denounced in the House of Commons the ‘ludicrously preposterous’ level of Bowring's remuneration.Footnote 66 The return of the Tories to power, between 1841 and 1846, temporarily ended his government employment.
But Bowring's missions abroad had enhanced his public standing, and in the 1840s, he became a major figure of the Anti-Corn Law League's campaign to establish free trade in Britain. In 1838, at a public dinner given by several Manchester manufacturers in his honour, Bowring stressed the sympathy for free trade that he had encountered in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Egypt, and asserted that if Britain emancipated ‘universal trade’ by abolishing the Corn Laws, she would be hailed as a ‘universal benefactor’.Footnote 67 The meeting resulted in the creation of the Anti-Corn Law Committee, soon to become the League and later enabling Bowring to describe himself as the League's ‘baptizer’.Footnote 68 In 1840, he testified before the select committee on import duties as an expert on foreign commercial policies, and underlined that trade protection in Britain discouraged liberalization in Spain, France, and Germany.Footnote 69 The following year, he became an MP for Bolton, after asserting on the hustings: ‘Jesus Christ is free trade, and free trade is Jesus Christ.’Footnote 70 He was also a regular and successful speaker at the League's meetings until the repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846. At a London meeting in 1843, for example, he praised the liberal policies of Holland and Tuscany, castigated the restrictive policies of Spain and the Pontifical States, evoked the yearning for ‘more commercial intercourse with us’ in Egypt and China, and concluded that Leaguers should promote free trade ‘Till the unfettered world shall see / Labour, and trade, and industry, / Free as the winds of heaven are free, / Free, free, for ever.’Footnote 71
Bowring remained, in the eyes of foreigners, a major, if not the main, representative of British free trade. In List's protectionist treatise, Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie (1891), Bowring was the most cited contemporary name, and the third most cited in total, after those of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say.Footnote 72 Bowring was also one of the main British delegates at an international ‘free-trade congress’ held at Brussels in September 1847. During its proceedings, he successfully manoeuvred the defeat of a motion that called only for the gradual liberalization of Continental tariffs.Footnote 73 Karl Marx, who had been denied access to the congress, delivered a vengeful speech to the Brussels Association Démocratique in January 1848, stating that the European working class had in ‘un Bowring, un Bright et consorts … ses plus grands ennemis et les hypocrites les plus effrontés’. Again, Bowring was the most cited contemporary name in Marx's speech.Footnote 74
These representations of Bowring as the incarnation of free trade may be surprising. It is Richard Cobden who is usually referred to as the figurehead of the free trade movement in Britain. Undeniably more popular than Bowring at home, Cobden also strove to spread free trade on the Continent during his European tour of 1846–7.Footnote 75 But the impact of this tour hardly sustains the comparison with Bowring's earlier efforts. Cobden's endeavours were crucially hampered by his limited knowledge of foreign languages. While in France, where he promoted free trade for just one month in 1846, Cobden took language lessons for two weeks in Paris and only gave two speeches, the one in Paris and the other in Bordeaux. The speeches that he read had been ‘translated’ and ‘corrected’ by Frédéric Bastiat and other French free traders. Moreover, Cobden mostly met with intellectuals and senior politicians.Footnote 76 All of this stands in stark contrast with Bowring's much longer labours and his extraordinary capacity to proselytize among merchants and provincial journalists as well as heads of state.
By the mid-1840s, Bowring had become a major mediator of debates about international trade between Britain, Continental Europe, and a fraction of the Middle East. His promotion of unilateral free trade abroad brought few immediate results. But his efforts were representative of the broader British pressure bearing on foreign countries to liberalize their trade policies, which eventually paid off. In the 1860s, Prussian civil servants – identified by Bowring as the main supporters of free trade in Germany – would steer the Zollverein towards freer trade.Footnote 77 In addition, his missions abroad enabled Bowring to play a significant role in the dissemination of free trade at home, where he emphasized and probably exaggerated the willingness to trade with Britain that he had encountered in foreign countries.
III
Bowring also played a larger role than Cobden and most British free traders in the dissemination of free trade in the extra-European world. On this issue, Bowring differed from the leaders of British and Continental free trade movements by embracing empire, formal and informal, as a means to promote the growth of global communications. Cobden and, for instance, Frédéric Bastiat in France, shunned imperial ventures as costly and immoral. Bowring adhered to the same ideal of a peaceful and prosperous world united by commerce as Cobden and Bastiat. But his determination led Bowring, like several other disciples of Bentham, to justify a reformed and liberal empire as a means to provide ‘civilization’ to ‘barbarous’ peoples. Drawing on his interest in ethnic and cultural diversity, Bowring also used the new language of race to stress the moral superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ over the more predatory colonizers from the European Continent and to legitimize the expansion of British rule and influence overseas.
Bentham himself was ambivalent, if not frankly hostile to imperial expansion. It was James Mill who reconciled utilitarianism with imperialism in his History of British India (1817), in which he considered it the duty of civilized nations such as Britain to improve the condition of barbarous societies such as India. His son, John Stuart, adhered to the same opposition between civilization and barbarity to justify imperial rule.Footnote 78 Despite his fraught relations with the Mills, Bowring espoused their dichotomous conception of mankind and endorsed the imposition of British rule over uncivilized peoples. In an article on the ‘Colonization and commerce of British India’ published in 1829, he cited approvingly the History of British India and asserted: ‘A power, a stupendous power, of good is in our hands, and the chances of happiness for the Indian people are greater from our dominion than from that of any masters to whom it is likely that they will be transferred.’ Yet at this date his support for British imperialism remained conditional and moderate. He demanded a thorough reform of the East India Company's administrative methods and hoped that a new mixed race, half European half Asian, would soon emerge to govern the Indian subcontinent and form a ‘bond of union’ between Britain and her main colonial possession.Footnote 79
Thereafter, his views on empire and race became more extreme. In Egypt and Syria, he lamented ‘the inertness of the Oriental character’ and propounded, as a remedy, an increase in ‘[t]he presence and influence of European and especially British merchants’, who would ‘call forth the undeveloped productive energies’ of the region.Footnote 80 The enthusiastic adhesion of British opinion to free trade in the 1840s, by contrast with the more limited success of liberal commercial ideas on the Continent, further persuaded him that Britain was the fittest nation to govern overseas colonies. Unlike other European colonial powers, she would endeavour to liberalize world trade rather than protect colonial markets for domestic manufacturers. Free trade, he claimed, should be one of the main goals of empire because ‘communication’ between nations was one of the main driving forces of civilization. ‘Communication’, he asserted in a lecture delivered in the early 1840s, ‘is civilization in activity … He who can communicate cheaply and rapidly with all his fellows must be elevated by the very fact of that communication.’ The civilizing function of communications conferred a special status to Britain, ‘a country in the world privileged above the rest, by being in communication with all’, thanks to her extensive trade and dominions.Footnote 81
Bowring's eulogy of communication did not only refer to the abolition of trade barriers. He cited technological progress, in particular railways and steamboats, as another major factor in the contemporary intensification of communications. Furthermore, his conception of communication encompassed the circulation of individuals and ideas as well as exchanges of commodities. His dedication to the international freedom of movement as a pillar of progress and civilization may be illustrated by his struggle against ‘contagionism’, a doctrine which attributed epidemics to contamination by already infected individuals and served to justify quarantine restrictions on travellers and merchandises. By contrast, ‘anti-contagionists’ stressed the influence of unhealthy environments in the spread of diseases. They viewed quarantine measures as an abuse of state power and, in Bowring's case, as a reflection of protectionist interests.Footnote 82 En route to Egypt in 1837, Bowring had been delayed by quarantine regulations and wished that all governments ‘agree on some international sanitary law – every where applicable’ and limiting such hindrances to travelling.Footnote 83 In Alexandria and Lebanon, he collected evidence from medical doctors about the oriental plague and, on his return to England, published a virulent anti-contagionist pamphlet. He argued that plague outbreaks were always ‘spontaneous’ and ‘never traceable from patient to patient’ and attributed contrary opinions to ‘a powerful, sinister, and pecuniary motive’, either the narrow self-interest of health administrators or the desire of foreign government to curtail foreign competition.Footnote 84 Six years later in the House of Commons, he again condemned contagionist theories as ‘the grossest superstition of the human race’ and voiced the hope that soon, ‘the harassing vexations – the costly sacrifices – the impediments to commerce and communication – the uncontrolled despotism of the Quarantine regulations would be wholly and for ever overthrown’.Footnote 85
In 1846, Bowring reiterated in a lecture his eulogy of ‘communication’ as ‘civilization in activity’ and drew an explicit connection with ‘Free Trade’, which, by facilitating communications, would bring ‘the same high destinies’ of peace and prosperity to ‘all the nations of the earth’. He also decisively connected free trade, communications, and the progress of civilization with British imperial expansion. Relinquishing his former criticisms of British colonial administration, he contrasted Britain's pacific expansion with the bloody conquest of Algeria by France and attributed British relative benevolence to the predominance of the ‘Anglo-Saxon blood’ in Britain:
The national genius of the Goths, and especially of the Anglo-Saxon family, is pacific. The Norman invasion introduced into these islands an infusion of that martial spirit which characterizes the Frankish races. But still the Anglo-Saxon blood predominates, and retains its indigenous virtue. If Great Britain has created, as undoubtedly she has created, an empire far wider than that of Greek and Roman fame, it has been less by the power of her arms than by the sway of her intellect. Her progress, in truth, has often been stained with blood; but comparatively less so, than that of the other European nations who invaded the American, Asiatic, African, or Australian territories.Footnote 86
In a series of articles celebrating the victory of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1847, Bowring also reconciled the rhetoric of free trade with the traditional British political economy of empire as a collection of dominions bound together by trade.Footnote 87 British imperial rule, he argued, was more firmly established than the Roman had been because it relied on ‘the benefits of profitable commercial interchange’ rather than military occupation: ‘The power which Rome once wielded – the power of the world – has been replaced by a mightier power – the power of commerce.’ In the same series of articles, Bowring paid homage to Augustin Thierry, who had drawn attention to the role of the ‘distinction of races’ in history. Bowring's belief in the specificity of a Germanic, Anglo-Saxon race may well have been rooted in the works of the French historian, especially his Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands (1825). Anticipating the consequences of free trade's victory in Britain, Bowring also predicted the end of ‘stagnation’ in the Muslim world and, more generally, ‘the advance of Western progress and civilization, upon Eastern backwardness and barbarism’.Footnote 88
Combining economic arguments with new ideas about civilization and race, Bowring had built a powerful liberal case for the extension of British rule and influence in the extra-European world. New financial misfortunes soon placed him in a position to put his beliefs to the test. Ruined by unsound investments during the economic crisis of 1847, he solicited Palmerston and Clarendon for public employment. In October 1848, his patrons appointed him consul at Canton, in southern China, with a salary of £1,800 per annum.Footnote 89 The consular service was not prestigious, but the mission was important. Canton was the largest of the five Chinese ports opened to foreign trade by the treaty of Nanking, which ended the first Opium war (1839–42). Yet the Canton authorities, alleging the anti-foreign feelings of the Cantonese, continued to ban foreigners, including merchants, from entering the city itself, and foreign nationals lived confined southwards of the city walls in a few compounds, ‘the factories’.Footnote 90 Bowring was to persuade the authorities to lift the remaining restrictions on international trade and, in particular, to allow free access to the city. He arrived at Canton in April 1849 but, as the city's most important Mandarins refused to receive him, could achieve nothing. After six months, Bowring reached the conclusion that only firmness, possibly aided by a demonstration of British military power, would secure the full opening of China to world trade: ‘The Chinese will give way – they always do to a determined policy – but when there is doubt, or hesitation, they attribute it to fear & awe.’Footnote 91
The British plenipotentiary in the Far East, George Bonham, turned down the consul's repeated requests for the adoption of a more trenchant policy, but Bowring did not remain inactive. In 1850, he visited the other ports (Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai) opened by the treaty of Nanking and made suggestions to reorganize the supervision of foreign trade there. The same year, after contracting a tropical disease, he went to rest in Macao. His sojourn in the old Portuguese colony reinforced his belief in the superiority of the white ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race and convinced him of the dangers of miscegenation. He found the town of Macao ‘pretty’, he wrote to his son Edgar, but
as for the inhabitants you can barely fancy how any European race could by mingling with Malayan, negro & Chinese blood degenerate into such extreme ugliness – and the language is as deteriorated as the race … The old spirit of adventure seems extinct both among Iberians & Lusitanians – & to have passed to the Gothic & especially the Anglo-Saxon race.Footnote 92
Bowring's concern with racial purity did not recede in later years. In 1855, on learning that Kamehameha IV, king of Hawaii, was going to marry Emma Rooke, a British descendant, he thought it ‘a discouraging prospect for the future well-being of the Island’. Intermarriage, in his opinion, harmed the interests of indigenous populations as well as Britons.Footnote 93
In 1851, Bowring's frustration at Canton built up into despair. Lamenting the futility of his exertions, he described himself as ‘a rotten weed … useless – humiliated & degraded – whom nobody listens to or cares about’. He did not resign, he told his son, only in order to retain his salary.Footnote 94 In 1852, he visited Ceylon and India, where he became aware of the importance of Indian opium exports to China for the Raj's revenue: ‘the ultimate solution’, he concluded, ‘will be the legalization of the trade [in China] to which in my judgement all our efforts ought to be directed’.Footnote 95 In 1853, he went to the Dutch East Indies, where he tried, again, to be ‘commercially useful’: meeting with the governor general in Batavia, Bowring found him ‘disposed to emancipate the Island & to give to Free Trade its fair chances here’.Footnote 96 From Java, he went home for a year's leave. In London, he persuaded Clarendon to appoint him governor of Hong Kong and plenipotentiary in the Far East. In addition, Bowring was knighted and his salary more than doubled, although he soon complained that ‘£4,000 a year [was] not enough.’Footnote 97 But his powers were vastly increased and he was now in a position, as he had expressed the wish in a letter to Cobden, to bring ‘commerce, – peace & civilization’ to ‘1/5 of the inhabited world containing 1/3 of the human race’.Footnote 98
IV
Returning to the Far East in February 1854, Bowring increasingly relied on British political influence and military power to spread free trade in the region. His aggressive policies culminated in October 1856 with the bombardment and occupation of Canton, in retaliation for the seizure of a small British vessel, the Arrow, by Chinese authorities. The course of action followed by Bowring cannot but evoke the paradigm of ‘the imperialism of free trade’ elaborated by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson to describe the rationale of British imperial expansion in the mid-nineteenth century. Gallagher and Robinson even cited the ‘warships at Canton’ as an example of this new rationale: ‘By informal means if possible, or by formal annexations when necessary, British paramountcy was steadily upheld’, or in other words, even in the heyday of free trade, between 1840 and 1870, Britain continued to seek ‘economic expansion, aided and abetted by political action’.Footnote 99
Critiques of Gallagher and Robinson have pointed at the radical ‘anti-imperialism’ of Richard Cobden and other prominent free traders as a fundamental incoherence in the ‘imperialism of free trade’ thesis.Footnote 100 But the part played by Bowring, a leading figure of the free trade movement, in the forceful opening of East Asian markets, shows that the rhetoric of free trade could be reconciled with an aggressive foreign policy. To that extent, Bowring may be considered as a major advocate of free trade imperialism. Yet his policies should not be construed as the continuation of traditional colonialism. As other critiques of Gallagher and Robinson have insisted, the proactive support of the British government for free trade overseas marked a significant shift away from mercantilist methods of exploitation such as territorial aggrandizement, coerced labour, and preferential tariffs.Footnote 101 Bowring's deep-seated hostility towards such methods was as remarkable as his willingness to employ military force to achieve his ends. Whether he should be called an ‘imperialist’ is a question of definition. But if so, it needs to be stressed that he espoused a liberal, informal, and benevolent conception of imperial dominance.
Bowring did not wish to undermine the authority of East Asian governments as a prelude to annexation. Rather, he lent them his support against internal disorders, out of humanitarian motives and in the hope to gain their co-operation on trade issues. For example, he used his authority to curb or at least regulate the ‘coolie’ trade, which was banned by Chinese law. Chinese coolies were indentured labourers, who were sent to work in often horrific conditions in the West Indies and South America. Bowring viewed the coolie emigration as ‘another Slave Trade’. He had several Britons involved in the kidnapping of Chinese female coolies prosecuted and tried to ensure at least decent conditions of passage on British ships involved in the trade.Footnote 102 His support for the Ch'ing regime against the Taiping rebellion was also characteristic. The revolt, which ravaged southern China during the 1850s, combined mystical, Christian-inspired elements with anti-Manchu and anti-Western nationalism. Evangelicals in Britain looked upon it favourably, hoping that it heralded China's conversion to Christianity.Footnote 103 But Bowring dismissed the rebels as ‘a mere rabble without any notion of government’. Fearing the progress of anarchy and its consequences on trade, he argued for a ‘protective’ attitude towards the decaying Ch'ing regime.Footnote 104
He inaugurated his policy of co-operation at Shanghai in the summer of 1854. Following the capture of the eastern port by the Taipings in September 1853, British and American merchants stopped paying duties to the port's customs. In July 1854, after Ch'ing authority was restored in the city, Bowring negotiated an agreement whereby Western merchants would pay the arrear duties in return for the creation of a foreign customs inspectorate and the granting of greater autonomy to the Shanghai foreign settlement. The Ch'ing officials were satisfied and implemented their side of the bargain. Both the customs inspectorate and the foreign settlement later became major instruments of Western influence in China.Footnote 105 Yet the offer to pay the arrear duties provoked the fury of British merchants, who successfully pressed the Foreign Office to renege on the plenipotentiary's pledge. Dismayed, Bowring condemned a short-sighted decision that endangered the ‘permanent interests of trade’ by incurring the ‘the ill-will of the court & the mandarins’.Footnote 106
Bowring's liberal imperialism was nonetheless compatible with the use of force, especially to obtain the liberalization of commercial relations. He praised Commodore Perry's successful use of gunboats to open Japan to American imports in 1854, although he derided ‘Perry's miserable … treaty’ for leaving in place too many restrictions on foreign trade.Footnote 107 In Bowring's view, the use of coercion did not infringe on the principles of free trade as long as it did not result in preferential trade regimes. His ‘intentions’, he reassured the governor of the Dutch East Indies, were ‘altogether of the most liberal character’, since he wanted ‘no exclusive privileges’ and desired ‘that all should enter by the gates [Britons] are able to open’.Footnote 108 Bowring first experimented with the coercive implementation of trade liberalization in Siam, at the western extremity of the region placed under his responsibility. Having secured for his own use two steamships, the Grecian and the Rattler, he set out in March 1855 for Bangkok. He wanted to persuade the Siamese government ‘that so fertile a country could be more profitably exploité by emancipating instead of fettering commerce’.Footnote 109 During the negotiations at Bangkok, Bowring left the Rattler anchored in front of the Siamese capital and, when a fraction of the Siamese court refused to abolish certain trade restrictions, threatened to leave the ship permanently stationed there. The recalcitrant Siamese princes immediately signed the commercial treaty drawn up by Bowring and his aides.Footnote 110
Bowring was delighted by the outcome of the expedition. He exulted that he had ‘emancipated [Siam] from her intolerable yoke, – & dragged her from her miseries into the bright fields of hope & peaceful commerce’.Footnote 111 Emboldened by his success, he envisaged to impose similar treaties on Cochinchina, so as to ‘bring another Oriental nation into our fold’, and Cambodia and Korea.Footnote 112 Yet his principal concern remained the opening of the Middle Kingdom to Western merchants. In the autumn of 1855, he conducted a small naval expedition to northern China, where he hoped to discuss trade relations with representatives of the Beijing government. He could only meet with minor officials and all his requests were turned down. From then until the outbreak of the Arrow War at Canton, he became increasingly convinced that only a strong display of British military power would induce the Chinese to accept the terms of the Nanjing treaty and to lift remaining restrictions on trade with the West.
The former secretary of the Peace Society did not want war, but he was willing to risk it to achieve his goal. Bowring had already renounced absolute pacifism by 1824.Footnote 113 He now expressed qualified support for wars that promoted the cause of civilization, as he explained about the Crimean War (1853–6) in a letter to a German correspondent: ‘War is to me a horrible expedient – but I can almost resign myself to its horrors, if they are to check the influence of a government so utterly barbarous as that of Russia.’Footnote 114 Given the importance accorded by Bowring to the civilizing function of ‘communication’, military coercion as a means to remove obstacles to foreign trade appeared morally acceptable to him. ‘Nous pouvons bien discuter’, he wrote to the governor of the Dutch East Indies, ‘si un peuple a le droit – oui ou non – de se tenir à l’écart du monde & – de dire je ne veux pas avoir affaire à vous – C'est une position qui n'est plus tenable', because mankind had entered ‘une ère nouvelle’ of progress based on ever freer commercial relations.Footnote 115 In reply to a letter from Cobden, who advised him to act cautiously with China, Bowring begged to differ in terms reminiscent of his response to Thiers, the French protectionist, twenty-three years earlier: ‘I do not think we should disagree as to the ends & objects to be accomplished here & everywhere – tho’ perhaps somewhat as to the means – & as qui veut la fin veut les moyens.'Footnote 116
His acceptance of military coercion to liberalize trade did not make Bowring an expansionist imperialist. Indeed, he was wary ‘lest the future should re-tell the tale of British India’: ‘The races of China’, he wrote regretfully to Clarendon, ‘are no more able to resist the pressure of British superiority in arts and arms than those of India, and it is no unusual characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, when settling in foreign regions, that they begin by trading and finish by governing.’Footnote 117 Such qualms did not prevent him from asking, repeatedly, for additional military capacity in 1855: ‘let me have some small naval force at my disposal’ and ‘I can do nothing without ships’, he pleaded to Clarendon. Bowring hoped that military intimidation would suffice, but he was determined to ‘strike boldly’:
We have been trifled with, – tantalized too long, – a natural result of our temporizings & hesitations. To suppose that our motives have been understood or appreciated is to be ignorant of the oriental mind – that mind never distinguishes between the will to do, – & the power of doing, – never attributes forbearance to anything but impotence, or dreams that hesitation can have any source but a sense of infirmity.
China, he wrote again in July 1856, like Japan, ‘[would] cede to fear and to menace and to nothing else’.Footnote 118
The Arrow War between Britain – soon joined by France – and China had deeper causes than Bowring's determination or prejudices about the ‘oriental mind’. Foremost among these causes was the British government's anxiety to secure the flow of Indian opium exports to China, on which relied the finances of the British Raj in India and the complex web of British commerce in Asia. But Bowring was keenly aware of the importance of the opium question and there is little doubt that his eagerness precipitated the conflict.Footnote 119 Indeed, Bowring was ‘not sorry’ when the Arrow incident occurred, ‘as the lesson will be a useful one, and may lead to many practical results’.Footnote 120 On 8 October 1856 at Canton, Chinese soldiers allegedly hauled down the British flag aboard the Arrow, a small vessel registered in Hong Kong, and arrested its twelve Chinese crewmembers on a charge of piracy. Bowring obtained the release of the sailors, but the Canton authorities rejected his other requests, including a renewed demand that foreigners be allowed to enter the city. ‘We must write a bright page in our history’, Bowring wrote to the British consul in Canton.Footnote 121 The plenipotentiary had the Royal Navy bombard Canton and on 29 October, British forces entered the city. Contrary to his predictions, Chinese resistance stiffened. Reluctantly, he applied home for reinforcements. Yet Bowring emphasized that he did not seek formal conquest:
I do not have the ambition which some [Indian newspapers] attribute to me of being the Lord Clive of China because I do not contemplate territorial dominion – but I do anticipate the establishment of an influence which shall not only secure the vast interests now compromised, but greatly extend them.Footnote 122
Bowring's handling of the Arrow incident provoked a fierce controversy at home. The British government published the plenipotentiary's official correspondence in defence of his proceedings. But the documents also revealed Bowring's awareness that the Arrow's British licence had expired by the time of its seizure by Chinese authorities. In the House of Commons, Cobden tabled a motion that condemned the government's policy in China and its executant's rash decisions. He deemed Bowring ‘entirely responsible’ for the course of events and called his official correspondence ‘the most flagitious public document [he] ever saw’. Ministers were lukewarm in their defence of Bowring, and only Palmerston paid a sustained homage to the plenipotentiary as ‘a man of the people … a man of great talents, of varied attainments, and eminently fitted for the situation’. On 3 March 1857, after a three-day acrimonious debate, Cobden's motion passed by a vote of 263 to 247.Footnote 123 Yet at the general election called by the prime minister following the vote, supporters of Palmerston triumphed. Cobden himself was defeated and John Bright came bottom of the poll in Manchester. Other factors than foreign policy were at play in the election, and Cobden and Bright also paid the price of their earlier unpopular opposition to the Crimean War.Footnote 124 But the results of the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Bo(w)ring election’ (The Punch) suggest that the British electorate was not repelled by Bowring's forceful methods to promote free trade in the East.Footnote 125
Bowring himself was unrepentant. Even after learning of the political crisis at home, he highlighted to Clarendon what he believed would be the ‘grand result’ of his policy at Canton: ‘There will be a trade with China – of which extent you can hardly form an adequate estimate. Its growth even now escapes all statistics.’Footnote 126 But Bowring was ill-rewarded for his labours. The repeated attacks on his name in parliament and the press had irremediably tarnished his reputation, and in March 1857, the government appointed Lord Elgin to replace him as plenipotentiary in the Far East. Bowring was hurt by this semi-disavowal, describing himself as ‘a man whose conduct his masters profess to have approved, – but these very masters these approving masters – give me cups of gall & bitterness to drink’.Footnote 127 He remained governor of Hong Kong for another two years but played no further part in the Arrow War, which ended in the autumn of 1860 with the opening of ten more ports to Western merchants and the legalization of opium imports into China. After touring the Philippines at the end of 1858, he returned to England in May 1859. Back in Europe, Bowring continued, in his private capacity, to promote free trade, and resumed his literary exertions. But he never again played a prominent role in political and commercial affairs.Footnote 128 He died in 1872.
V
Free trade proved a malleable concept in Bowring's hands. The disciple of Bentham and agent of Palmerston adroitly recombined, in varying proportions according to political and cultural contexts, arguments based on utilitarian philosophy, political economy, British interests, or the language of race and civilization. But he was not a major theoretician. His accomplishments rather underline the role played by practical factors, alongside abstract theory, in the global dissemination of free trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Such practical factors range from his extraordinary personal mobility – facilitated by the rapid improvement in seaborne and overland transport after 1830 – to his financial motivation in spreading free trade. They also include his fluency in (European) languages, his skilful use of contemporary media when he could address public opinion, and his embrace of gunboat diplomacy as a tool for removing obstacles to communications outside Europe.
Bowring's case also suggests that studies on the dissemination of ideas ought to analyse the propagation of concepts in their global as well as national or continental contexts. Despite the flexibility of his methods, Bowring pursued the same goal from Bordeaux to Canton: the lifting of restrictions on the free movement of commodities, ideas, and travellers. This goal became increasingly intertwined, in Bowring's mind, with the spread of British ‘influence’ – a word he used to describe his exertions in France and Egypt as well as China. Support for free trade lobbies on the European Continent and the opening of East Asian markets by gunboats may be construed as two facets of the same policy. The dissemination of free trade should be considered not only as a practical, but also as a global and continuous process, changing in intensity according to local military, political, and cultural conditions.
