I
t was a cruel coincidence of history that Qing dynastic decline coin-
cided precisely with the early Industrial Revolution and the rise of
aggressive western European powers competing for world domina-
tion through two major enterprises: trade and warfare. Spain and Por-
tugal had fi rst dominated the Asia trade in the fi fteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the Dutch dominated the trade in the seventeenth century,
and Britain emerged as by far the dominant European power in the
eighteenth century. As western European countries competed during
these years in trade and warfare, they began to enslave millions of Afri-
cans and to conquer and colonize much of the New World, Africa, and
India. The Qing court remained largely ignorant of these processes.
In the late eighteenth century, British traders came to feel increas-
ingly frustrated with problems in the China trade. The British had grown
very fond of Chinese silks, porcelains, and tea and were losing millions
of ounces of silver annually to the China trade. Merchants ranked very
low in the Confucian value system, and the Qing government saw inter-
national trade not as a way to generate new wealth but as a privilege
granted to less-developed “barbarians” in exchange for their paying
respects to the Son of Heaven and his court. British merchants were
allowed to trade only at the southeastern seaport of Guangzhou (known
in the West as Canton), where they were confi ned to a few warehouses
and allowed to reside only temporarily to load and unload their ships.
In frustration, the British government sent two offi cial missions to
the Qing court in Beijing, in 1793 and 1816, to seek the opening of new
trading ports to British merchants and to request that an offi cial envoy
from the British government be allowed to reside in Beijing. Both of these
missions ended in complete frustration. In 1793, the Qianlong Emperor
dismissed every British request as ridiculous, warning that British mer-
chants would be expelled if they tried to come ashore anywhere other
chapter 7