作者: Song-Chuan Chen
出版社: Hong Kong University Press
副标题: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War
出版年: 2017-5-2
页数: 248
定价: USD 50.00
装帧: Hardcover
ISBN: 9789888390564
内容简介 · · · · · ·
Merchants of War and Peace challenges conventional arguments that the major driving forces of the First Opium War were the infamous opium smuggling trade, the defence of British national honour, and cultural conflicts between ‘progressive’ Britain and ‘backward’ China. Instead, it argues that the war was started by a group of British merchants in the Chinese port of Canton in the 1830s, known as the ‘Warlike party’. Living in a period when British knowledge of China was growing rapidly, the Warlike party came to understand China’s weakness and its members returned to London to lobby for intervention until war broke out in 1839.
However, the Warlike party did not get its way entirely. Another group of British merchants known in Canton as the ‘Pacific party’ opposed the war. In Britain, the anti-war movement gave the conflict its infamous name, the ‘Opium War’, which has stuck ever since. Using materials housed in the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge University Library, this meticulously researched and lucid volume is a new history of the cause of the First Opium War.
作者简介 · · · · · ·
Song-Chuan Chen (PhD, Cambridge) is an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. He specializes in modern Chinese history; his research focuses on the history of Sino-Western interactions and the history of the Chinese lower classes.
目录 · · · · · ·
Prologue viii
Map of the Pearl River Delta in the 1830s x
1. Introduction 1
2. The Warlike and Pacific Parties 11
3. Breaking the Soft Border 38
4. Intellectual Artillery 61
5. A War of Words over ‘Barbarian 82
6. Reasoning Britain into a War 103
7. The Regret of a Nation 126
8. Conclusions: Profit Orders of Canton 150
Acknowledgements 161
Notes 163
Glossary 193
Bibliography 196
Index 222