History of the Opium Trade

Two reviews of current events by Marx analyzing Britain’s opium trade with China. Written on August 31 and September 3, 1858, successively appeared in the form of editorials in New-York Daily Tribune, No. 5433 and No. 5438, September 20 and 25, 1858.

During the Second Opium War, the opium trade became more rampant, and a large number of opium was smuggled into China, and the total value of opium imported into China in 1856 was about 35 million U.S. Dollars. Marx wrote these two articles for the purpose of exposing the evil nature of opium “free” trade and point out the disastrous consequences of China’s doomed failure in the war of aggression.

During the Second Opium War, the opium trade became more rampant, and a large number of opium was smuggled into China, and the total value of opium imported into China in 1856 was about 35 million U.S. Dollars. Marx wrote these two articles for the purpose of exposing the evil nature of opium “free” trade and point out the disastrous consequences of China’s doomed failure in the war of aggression.

In these two articles, Marx exposed the fraudulence and hypocrisy of the so-called “free” trade advocated by the British government which was “flagrant self-contradiction of the Christianity-canting and civilization-mongering”, and revealed that the essence of the opium trade was to “keep the wholesale manufacture of the deleterious drug a close monopoly in its hands” and monopolize the opium smuggling trade. Marx held: “While the British government is openly preaching free trade in poison, it also secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture.” “Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to lie at the bottom of its ‘freedom.’” Marx pointed out that, on the one hand, the British government with a hypocritical mask, monopolized the production of opium in India, legalized the sale and smuggling of opium, hollowed out China’s national treasury, seized a large amount of unjust gains, destroyed the physical and mental health of the Chinese people, strangled the soul of the Chinese people, corrupted social morality and corroded the ruling foundation of the late Qing government. On the other hand, the Chinese people’s resistance to the aggressive war caused by the opium trade was just, but China’s rigid and backward social system and the corrupt and incompetent late Qing government were doomed to the tragic result of inevitable failure. “That a giant empire, containing almost one-third of the human race, vegetating in the teeth of time, insulated by the forced exclusion of general intercourse, and thus contriving to dupe itself with delusions of Celestial perfection-that such an empire should at last be overtaken by fate on [the] occasion of a deadly duel, in which the representative of the antiquated world appears prompted by ethical motives, while the representative of overwhelming modern society fights for the privilege of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest markets—this, indeed, is a sort of tragical couplet stranger than any poet would ever have dared to fancy.”

History of the Opium Trade comprehensively and profoundly exposed the essence of the British government’s emphasis on the “free” opium trade and expounded the tragic result of China’s “pirate plunder”, and is a classic for Marx’s analysis of actual problems with historical materialism.