War is never inevitable.

However, historians have used a variety of

arguments to assert that the first Opium War was an inevitable
consequence of Anglo-Chinese commercial contact. In 1907, a
missionary W.A.P. Martin, in his book The Awakening of China, has
viewed the war as a result of series of collisions between the
conservatism of the Orient and the progressive spirit of the West, and
also because China was backward and unable to change with the times.
Earl Pritchard claimed that the British and the Chinese ‘thought and
acted in a way almost directly opposed to one another.’ Unlike Britain’s
experience in Europe, China developed in relative isolation and refused
to accept the British government’s demands to be treated as equals. As
British merchants expanded their economic connections with the
Chinese, the lack of any diplomatic relations, which might have
peacefully settled conflicts between the two countries, made an armed
contest unavoidable.

The deep-seated cultural differences had a major role in the outbreak of

hostilities in 1839. However, if this war had been fought to remove
these differences then the war would have been fought much earlier and
not as late as when the opium crisis developed. Thus, interpretations
that rest on cultural differences fail to fully explain the motivation
behind the first Anglo-Chinese war.

Historians, such as Michael Greenberg, have found the source of the

inevitable tensions between the British and the Chinese in Britain’s
expanding modern economy. They argue that in the early 19th century
British merchants and industrialists, the new dynamic players in the
British economy, forced Parliament to abolish the East India Company’s
monopoly of the China trade. They also wanted to break down the
Chinese government’s restrictions on trade, embodied in the Canton
system, thus opening China’s market to goods produced by Britain’s
expanding industrial economy. With the abolition of the Company’s
monopoly in 1834, the newly created British Trade Commission actively
pressed for a formal commercial treaty and even sought to an excuse to
wage war to force the Chinese into submission.

According to Tan Chung and J.Y. Wong, the East India Company needed
the expansion of the China trade- opium exports – in order to finance
the government of India and to pay for Chinese tea, a highly prized
commodity in Britain. When Commissioner Lin tried to put an end to the
illegal drug trade, a response by the British government was inevitable,
because the Indian government and its tea investment in China could
not survive without the money derived from the sale of opium.

The viewpoints of the economic theorists have been refuted by many

historians who do no regard them as convincing.

John Byng wrote an account of the Chinese-British encounters in his

book Embassy to China in which he argues that the war which broke out
between China and Britain was a trade war, a conflict which occurred
because China failed to respond to the western approaches which the
West had made through several missions such as the Lord McCartney
and Lord Amherst missions. If China had opened up to the West and
removed all restrictions war could have easily been averted. China was
denying the western countries their natural right to trade. China had
failed to modernize their ideas as far as commercial perspectives were
concerned.

Historians like Hsin Pao Chang have pointed out that it was only in the
early 19th century that the British resentment increased against the
Chinese regulations and this resentment had occurred because of the
changing economic conditions arising out of the Industrial Revolution
and the rise of merchant capitalism. Britain’s needs had changed which
inevitably would have resulted in a conflict with the Chinese authorities.
Chang has called the war fought between Britain and China as a “trade
war” since trade held the focal point in the conflict, the nature of the
trade being irrelevant.

Tan Chung argues that the struggle against the suppression of the
opium trade led the British to use their military strength. He believes
that the basic cause of the war was British commercial expansion on the
one hand and the Chinese trying to contain their expansion on the other.
He has also carried out a detailed study of the circumstances and
characteristics that led to the First Opium War. He is of the belief that
the initiative of the war lay with the British. Britain’s motives for
launching a war against the Chinese were: firstly, to stop the Manchu
anti-opium campaign; and secondly, to salvage her booming business in
the Sino opium trade and also to pressurize China to allow her to further
extend her influence into China.

According to Victor Purcell, “it was opium which finally brought China
and Britain into collision”.

Thus, the entire trade triangle of Indian opium for the Chinese, Chinese
tea for the British and the British Raj for Indians played a decisive role,
leading to the outbreak of the first Opium War.