Bello, "Opium and the limits of empire: The opium problem in the Chinese interior, 1729--1850," 2001

David Anthony Bello, Ph.D.

Abstract (Summary)
This dissertation examines the Qing opium problem in a comparative regional context. The smuggling trade pursued by Britain on the eastern seacoast of China during the early nineteenth century has become the symbol of China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. Opium, however, was not simply a Sino-British problem geographically confined to southeastern China, but an empire-wide crisis that spread among an ethnically diverse populace and created regionally and culturally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.

Chapter one examines the futile attempt by the British to prohibit the production and export of opium by indirectly-ruled or independent "native states" outside the direct administrative control of the East India Company during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Neither the British system nor the Qing's proved able to account for ethnic and geographic diversity. Chapter two's overview of the junxian , beg and native chieftain administrative systems, which would mediate the execution of central prohibition policy in several key regions of China, reveals that there were large areas of Qing territory in western China that remained largely or entirely unincorporated, into which the opium traffic rapidly flowed. Chapter three provides a chronology of central prohibition policy formation and its implementation in select junxian areas of the Han core.

Local implementation of the prohibitions is also the theme of chapters four and five, with an emphasis on how the beg and native chieftan systems each coped with their unique regional opium problems.

Chapter six draws concludes that the mutual failure of prohibition in both British India and Qing China demonstrates that neither state's organization was equal to the challenges of opium production, distribution and consumption. Regional studies of the Qing opium problem suggest that 18th century Qing expansionism and its consequent administrative instability provided fertile ground for the opium trade, which, by the time prohibition began in earnest in 1839, was no longer simply a problem of Sino-Western relations, but a Qing domestic problem with its own dynamics and trajectory of development.

Advisor: Wills, John E., Jr.