Dr. Umar Khan
Dr. Khan belongs to a Lahore based Think Tank.
30-8-25
.jpeg "The undisputed Hero of Humanity")
The Opium Wars: The Worst Unrecognized and Unrepentant Crime of Human History
“Death of a young man due to accident or disease is a
tragedy but addiction to narcotics is a far greater one.”
In the eighteenth century
Britain had effectively subjugated significant portion of the globe. The
massive and wealthy India was under its control impoverished and destroyed by brutal
looting and pillaging enriching itself in the process. Then after a small
hiccup of Napoleanic wars Britain became the unchallenged world power extremely
powerful and rich subjugating vast countries that would provide men and
resources for further wars The never ending wars by the Brits started that are
still continuing. British violence had gone berserk by the nineteenth century.
Now it was the turn of the
world’s most populous and rich country, China, whose immense riches were to be
grabbed. Some avariciousness.
This rapacity made Britain sell
opium to the Chinese who had banned it due to a very high percentage of opium
addicts with awful effects on economy and every other aspect of society. After
trying to end opium trade for many years peacefully, the Chinese turned
assertive enforcing its closure and this caused a series of Opium Wars, one of
history's most brazen and destructive crimes, a state-sponsored narcotics
operation enforced by naval gunboats. The British Empire, in this context, was
the Pablo Escobar of the nineteenth century, operating on a global scale with a
royal charter.
The Poisoned Trade and a Resisting Soldier
Opium, grown in
British-subjugated Bengal of India was smuggled into China on an industrial
scale, creating a cycle of addiction and silver drainage that crippled the
Chinese society and economy.
Lin Zexu was the soldier appointed
to resist this crime. Appointed by the Emperor in 1839, he acted decisively, His
approach was methodical and decisive consisting of:
a. Domestic Crackdown: He first targeted Chinese
opium dealers, smokers, and corrupt officials who enabled the trade. He
implemented rehabilitation programs and harsh penalties for users.
b. Confrontation with Foreign Merchants: He arrived
in Guangzhou in March 1839 and immediately blockaded the foreign merchants in
their factories (warehouses). He demanded they surrender all stocks of opium
and sign bonds promising never to trade the drug again.
c. Destruction of opium: Lin Zexu seized 1.2 million kilograms
(approx. 2.6 million pounds) of opium. In a massive public works project
lasting 23 days (June 3 to June 25, 1839), he had the opium dissolved in water,
salt, and lime in trenches and flushed out to sea at Humen Beach. This act was
a powerful symbolic victory.
d. Diplomatic offensive: In a remarkable diplomatic
move, Lin wrote an open letter to Queen Victoria of England. Appealing to moral
reason, he questioned how Britain could permit such a harmful trade and
famously asked, "Suppose there were people from another country who
carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and
smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly
aroused." History I silent if the letter never reached the Queen as
there were no replies.
In summary, Lin Zexu's role
was that of a principled and determined official who took drastic action to
eradicate the opium trade to save his nation from social and economic collapse.
While his campaign failed in the short term and led to a disastrous war, it
established his enduring legacy as a Chinese symbol of the fight against drugs
and foreign domination.
He understood the human cost,
and in his righteous fury, he dismissed the British as
an "insignificant and detestable race, trusting entirely to their
strong ships and large guns." He reasoned that: “A murderer of
one person is subject to the death sentence; just imagine how many people opium
has killed! Our purpose is to eliminate this poison once and for all and to the
benefit of all mankind.”
Britain’s response was not
introspection, but invasion. The might of the Royal Navy was deployed to
protect the "right" of its merchants to earn colossal profits by
making a nation addicted to narcotics.
A contemporary analogy by
David Mitchell makes it brutally clear: "It would be like the
Colombians invading Washington in the early twenty-first century and forcing
the White House to legalize heroin. And saying, 'Don't worry, we'll show
ourselves out, and take Florida while we're at it, okay? Thanks very
much.'"
Even in Britain, voices of
conscience cried out. Future Prime Minister William Gladstone denounced it
as "Palmerston's Opium War... A war more unjust in its origin, a war
more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace,
I do not know and have not read of." His protest was in vain and
history books didn’t blame Palmerton or Queen Victoria for this colossal crime.
The strangest heinous crime with no parallel in the known human history.
Historian Julia Lovell
reflects on the psychological effects on such aggressors, noting
how "war guilt" can lead to blaming the injured party and
persisting with violence. China was not just defeated; it was humiliated.
It didn’t end up there and China was further blamed for resisting free trade of
narcotics.
The Treaty of Nanjing
(1842) formalized this humiliation, the first of the "unequal
treaties." It forced China to cede Hong Kong, open five ports to foreign
trade, grant extraterritoriality to British citizens, and pay a massive
indemnity. More opium wars were forced upon China with even more indemnities,
killings and humiliation. Shockingly the destitute, abjectly poor Chinese were
paying indemnities till the start of the Second World War.
The century of shame had
begun, culminating in later events where foreign powers, having set up a
puppet government in Peking legitimized virulent racism, loot and humiliation
of the Chinese at every opportunity. Signboards were put in public places
restricting and equating Chinese with dogs, less than humans in their own land.
The Chinese government and
society were destabilized causing the Taiping rebellion resulting in over 30
million deaths. Millions more died in famines like the great famine of 1876-79
when tens of millions perished. Although there is no conclusive study but the
estimates of direct and indirect loss of lives due to the drug pushing by the
British Empire tops a hundred million, an absolutely massive tragedy.
The damages were
catastrophic. In China, addiction ravaged the social fabric, causing
incalculable suffering, deaths, and instability. The nation was carved into
spheres of influence, its sovereignty shattered. The collective trauma of this
subjugation fuels China's foreign policy and national psyche to this day.
Worst of all the national
self-esteem of the Chinese, just like Indians, was demolished. More than a
century later during my childhood the Chinese were known and ridicule as
useless addicts good for nothing. It took China many more revolutions and loss
of life to come out of this calamity and claim its place in the comity of
nations as a respectable nation.
But this crime had another,
often overlooked, victim: India. The British monopoly on opium forced Indian
farmers to replace food crops with poppy, directly contributing to famines, including
the horrific famines of Bengal. As Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali, the First Prime
Minister of India's Provisional Government, astutely observed, the British were
sea-wolves, and “The difference in modern times is the refinement of
hypocrisy which sharpens the edges of brutality.” India was made both a
weapon and a victim in this criminal enterprise.
A Crime Without an Apology
The Opium Wars were not a
historical anomaly but a calculated act of narcoterrorism for economic gain.
The suffering, death, and instability they caused, the residual national
humiliations that linger, and the sheer moral bankruptcy of the act mark it as
the historical crime that most demands an apology and repentance, maybe compensation
too.
Heroes and villains of this
crime must be identified and our history books corrected for the future
generations.
The roles are starkly
defined: Lin Zexu, the official who stood for public health and sovereignty I an
absolute hero of the decent humanity.
The British government under
Queen Victoria, which, when presented with a plea for basic human decency, chose
instead to accumulate more wealth irrespective of its catastrophic effects on
hundreds of millions is a vicious villain.
This particular tragedy
speaks volumes about the legitimacy that we impart on pursuing national
interest irrespective of scruples, an unqualified moral bankruptcy.
This is a chapter of history
that stands as a permanent stain on humanity, a testament to the fact that the
greatest crimes are not always committed in the shadows, but sometimes in the
broad daylight of imperial policy. If there was ever a need for national
apology and collective guilt, this crime was one of most deserving. We can
start by calling Lin Zexu and universal hero for resisting and condemning Queen
Victoria for promoting narcotrafficking.
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