Empire in Asia: British India, the Opium Wars and Qing China

India: from trading company to empire

In 1750, India's Mughal Empire was weakening, and regional states competed for power. The British East India Company, a private company with its own army of Indian soldiers (sepoys), won the Battle of Plassey in Bengal in 1757 and gained the right to collect taxes there. Over the next century, through war, alliances and annexation, the Company came to rule most of the subcontinent directly or through princely states that accepted British control.

Company rule brought some reforms promoted by Indian and British reformers, such as the banning of sati (the burning of widows) in 1829, which the Bengali reformer Ram Mohan Roy had campaigned against. But it also brought heavy land taxes, the takeover of states whose rulers died without a direct heir, and policies that disrupted Indian society. India's railways began in 1853, built mainly to move troops, raw materials for export and British goods.

1857: Mutiny or war of independence?

In May 1857, sepoys at Meerut rebelled. A trigger was the rumour that new rifle cartridges, which soldiers bit open, were greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to both Hindus and Muslims. But grievances ran much deeper: annexations, land taxes, the loss of status for old elites, and fear that the British meant to force Christianity on India.

Rebels marched to Delhi and proclaimed the elderly Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar their leader. The rising spread across northern and central India; leaders included Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, who died fighting in 1858. Both sides committed atrocities, and the British suppression was extremely violent. In 1858, Parliament abolished the Company's rule; India came under the British Crown, and in 1876 Queen Victoria took the title Empress of India.

What to call it is itself a historical argument. British writers called it the "Indian Mutiny" or "Sepoy Mutiny", stressing a military revolt. In 1909, the Indian nationalist V. D. Savarkar called it the "First War of Indian Independence". Many historians today use neutral terms such as the Rebellion or Uprising of 1857, and note that it was too divided to be a single national movement, but much wider than a mutiny.

The economics of the Raj and the famines

British rule brought railways, telegraphs, irrigation canals and English-language universities. It also reshaped India's economy to serve Britain: India exported raw cotton, jute, indigo, wheat and opium, and imported British manufactured goods. Indian taxpayers paid for the costs of governing India, the Indian Army's wars across Asia and Africa, and pensions and interest sent to Britain. The Indian economist and politician Dadabhai Naoroji called this a "drain of wealth".

In the late 1800s, droughts struck India. During the Great Famine of 1876–1878, an estimated 5 to 10 million people died. Grain continued to be exported from some regions, and the government limited relief, believing that generous aid would harm the market and the budget. Further famines struck in the late 1890s. Historians debate the balance of causes, but many argue that colonial policy, by putting markets and budgets ahead of lives, turned droughts into catastrophes. The economist Amartya Sen, born in India, later argued that famines are rarely caused by a simple shortage of food; they happen when people lose the means to obtain food and governments fail to respond.

Educated Indians organized in response. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, at first asked for a greater Indian share in government. In the next century it would lead India to independence (see the unit The World since 1900).

China: the Opium Wars

In 1800, Qing China was the world's most populous state and a major economy. Foreign trade was limited to the port of Canton (Guangzhou), under strict rules. Britain bought huge amounts of Chinese tea but had little China wanted, so it paid in silver.

To reverse this, British merchants sold opium grown in British India, smuggling it into China, where it was banned. Addiction spread and silver flowed out. In 1839, the Qing official Lin Zexu confiscated and destroyed more than 20 000 chests of opium and wrote to Queen Victoria arguing that Britain would not allow such harm to its own people, so it should not inflict it on China.

Britain went to war (the First Opium War, 1839–1842). Its steam-powered gunboats defeated Qing forces. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842) forced China to:

• give Hong Kong Island to Britain;
• open five treaty ports, including Shanghai, to British trade and residence;
• pay a large indemnity and accept low, fixed tariffs.

A follow-up treaty gave British citizens extraterritoriality. Other powers demanded the same rights. In the Second Opium War (1856–1860), British and French forces occupied Beijing and looted and burned the emperor's Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan). The treaties that followed legalized the opium trade, opened more ports and allowed foreign diplomats in Beijing and missionaries in the interior. China calls these the unequal treaties, and the period from 1839 the beginning of a "century of humiliation".

Rebellion and the crisis of the Qing

• The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Hong Xiuquan, who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus, led a huge movement that set up the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with its capital at Nanjing. It promised land reform and equality between men and women. The war that followed was one of the deadliest of the nineteenth century, causing tens of millions of deaths (estimates commonly range from about 20 to 30 million). Regional Qing armies, with some foreign help, finally defeated it.
• Foreign pressure grew. Russia took territory in the north. France took Vietnam (French Indochina, from 1887) after a war with China. Japan defeated China in 1894–1895 and took Taiwan. In 1898, European powers and Japan seized leases and spheres of influence, a "scramble for concessions". The United States called for an "Open Door" (equal trade access for all powers) in 1899.
• The Boxer Uprising (1899–1901). A secret society known in English as the Boxers attacked missionaries, Chinese Christians and foreigners, and besieged the foreign legations in Beijing in 1900. An eight-nation foreign army captured Beijing. The Boxer Protocol (1901) imposed a huge indemnity and stationed foreign troops in the capital.

By 1900, the Qing dynasty survived, but it was weakened by internal rebellion, foreign wars and debt. The next lesson compares the Qing's reform efforts with those of Japan and the Ottoman Empire. Elsewhere in Asia, Britain took Burma, the Dutch expanded control of the East Indies, and the United States took the Philippines from Spain in 1898 and fought Filipino independence forces. Siam (Thailand) kept its independence through reform and careful diplomacy.