Based upon your required and supplemental learning materials and resources, complete your assignments.
Please Read – Required Reading
- How Bombay’s Parsis cracked the opium trade. Edited by: Bibyendu Gaguly on January 20, 2014.
- Economic Histories of the Opium Trade – Siddharth Chandra – University of Pittsburg
- Dark history: How Indian opium traders from Bombay helped the British Raj wreck China’s economy https://scroll.in/article/894050/dark-history-how-indian-opium-traders-from-bombay-helped-the-british-raj-destroy-chinas-economy
- Opium Wars: Background Reading by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada
Supplemental Materials (Recommended Reading)
- Article: Opium Wars. (2016). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Opium-Wars
- Article Excerpt: “England and China: The Opium Wars – 1839-60” by Philip V. Allingham, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web; Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario.
- Report Excerpt: “2. A Century of International Drug Control” by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crimes (2008).
- Required Videos
- Video: The First Opium War – IV: Conflagration and Surrender – Extra History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9WRmsHFUg0
The East India Company was a front company for the British Royal family and the establishment. The company’s belief was ‘Trade where necessary, plunder where possible’. At its height, the income of the opium trade was around 30% of the British government’s total income.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2CYPdYwcY
The Opium War started as a dispute over trading rights between China and Great Britain. Regular trade between Europe and the Chinese had been ongoing for centuries. But China’s trading restrictions frustrated the British who were eager to supply the Chinese people with the increasingly popular narcotic Opium. Circumventing the government’s attempts to ban opium trade by smuggling and bribery, China declared the death sentence on Opium smuggling and refused to compensate British tradesmen for any losses. Furiously, the Brits sent out a fleet to demand compensation and end the Cohong trading monopoly. Fierce battles and attacks on the Chinese coast were followed. Find out all about the First Opium War from Indy in our new episode of Battlefields!
- Can you identify the groups that gained from and supported the trade in opium between the British,the Indians, and the Chinese?
- Compare the persistence in the export of Opium to China and the persistence of the export of Opium and its derivative into the USA?
- In what way could you say that the methods are the same in China as in the USA today.
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