An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

40. THE BRITISH IN IRELAND

The doctrine of economic liberalism, or Free Trade, gained its decisive victory in 1846, when the Tory Prime Minister, Lord Peel, made a dramatic volte-face and voted for the repeal of the Corn Laws, thereby creating civil war in his party and condemning it to the political wilderness for a generation. But before he left office, the terrible fruits of the doctrine he had just espoused were making themselves felt in one of the greatest tragedies of modern history: the Irish famine.

True, the immediate cause of the famine was not Free Trade, but a blight of the potato crop on which the eight million Irish depended for their survival. However, it was the callousness of the English governing class – caused in no small part by the political and economic doctrines it espoused – that made the eventual death-toll (1.1 million between 1845 and 1850) as large as it was. As Niall Ferguson writes: “It may have been phytophthora infestans that ruined the potatoes; but it was the dogmatic laissez-faire policies of Ireland’s British rulers that turned harvest failure into outright famine.”⁶⁹
John Mitchel put the same point as follows in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) 1860: “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”
“These words,” writes A.N. Wilson, “very understandably became the unshakeable conviction of the Irish, particularly those forced into exile by hunger. The tendency of modern historians is not so much to single out individuals for blame, such as Charles Edward Trevelyan, permanent head of the Treasury, as to point to the whole attitude of mind of the governing class and the, by modern standards, gross inequalities which were taken for granted. Almost any member of the governing class would have shared some of Trevelyan’s attitudes.
“But there is more to John Mitchel’s famous statement (one could almost call it a declaration of war) than mere rhetoric. Deeply ingrained with the immediate horrors of the famine was the overall structure of Irish agrarian society, which placed Irish land and wealth in the hands of English (or in effect English) aristocrats. It was the belief of a Liberal laissez-faire economist such as Lord John Russell that the hunger of Irish peasants was not the responsibility of government but of landowners. No more callous example of a political doctrine being pursued to the death – quite literally – exists in the annals of British history. But Lord John Russell’s government, when considering the Irish problem, were not envisaging some faraway island in which they had no personal concern. A quarter of the peers in the House of Lords had Irish interests…”⁷⁰
Another factor contributing to English callousness was “No Popery”. “There were plenty who saw [the famine] as ‘a special “mercy”, calling sinners both to evangelical truth and the Dismantling of all artificial obstacles to divinely-inspired spiritual and economic order’, as one pamphlet put it.”⁷¹
In spite of such attitudes, there were English men and women who felt their consciences and contributed to the relief of the famine – Queen Victoria and Baron Rothschild among them. “Yet these overtures from the English side,” continues Wilson, “were undoubtedly made against a tide of prejudice and bitterness. The hordes of Irish poor crowding into English slums did not evoke pity – rather, fear and contempt. The Whiggish Liberal Manchester Guardian blamed the famine quite largely on the feckless Irish attitudes to agriculture, family, life in general. Small English farmers, said this self-righteous newspaper, don’t divide farms into four which are only sufficient to feed one family. (The economic necessities which forced the Irish to do this were conveniently overlooked by the Manchester Guardian: indeed economic weakness, in the Darwinian jungle, is the equivalent of sin.) Why weren’t the English starving? Because ‘they bring up their children in habits of frugality, which qualify them for earning their own living, and then send them forth into the world to look for employment’.
“We are decades away from any organized Irish Republican Movement. Nevertheless, in the midst of the famine unrest, we find innumerable ripe examples of British double standards where violence is in question. An Englishman protecting his grossly selfish way of life with a huge apparatus of police and military, prepared to gun down the starving, is maintaining law and order. An Irishman retaliating is a terrorist. John Bright, the Liberal Free Trader, hero of the campaign against the Corn Laws, blamed Irish idleness for their hunger – ‘I believe it would be found on inquiry, that the population of Ireland, as compared with that of England, do not work more than two days a week.’ The marked increase in homicides during the years 1846 and 1847 filled these English liberals with terror. There were 68 reported homicides in Ireland in 1846, 96 in 1847, 126 shootings in the latter year compared with 55 the year before. Rather than putting these in the contexts of hundreds of thousands of deaths annually by starvation, the textile manufacturer from Rochdale blames all the violence of these starving Celts on their innate idleness. ‘Wherever a people are not industrious and not employed, there is the greatest danger of crime and outrage. Ireland is idle, and therefore she starves; Ireland starves, and therefore she rebels.’
“Both halves of this sentence are factually wrong. Ireland most astonishingly did not rebel in, or immediately after, the famine years; and we have said enough to show that though there was poverty, extreme poverty, before 1845, many Irish families survived heroically on potatoes alone. The economic structure of a society in which they could afford a quarter or a half an acre of land on which to grow a spud while the Duke of Devonshire owned Lismore, Bolton (and half Yorkshire), Chatsworth (and ditto Derbyshire), the whole of Eastbourne and a huge palace in London was not of the Irish peasant’s making.
“By 1848/9 the attitude of Lord John Russell’s government had become Malthusian, not to say Darwinian, in the extreme. As always happens when famine takes hold, it was followed by disease. Cholera swept through Belfast and Co. Mayo in 1848, spreading to other districts. In the workhouses, crowded to capacity, dysentery, fevers and ophthalmia were endemic – 13,812 cases of ophthalmia in 1849 rose to 27,200 in 1850. Clarendon and Trevelyan now used the euphemism of ‘natural causes’ to describe death by starvation. The gentle Platonist-Hegelian philosopher Benjamin Jowett once said, ‘I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.’ As so often Sydney Smith was right: ‘The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.’”⁷²
Although one part of the English establishment came to favour “Home Rule”, i.e. independence, for the Irish, the bitterness that earlier policies caused remained, making Ireland the biggest failure of British imperial rule…

41. THE BRITISH IN CHINA
We have seen that the British ruling classes thoroughly exploited their industrial poor for financial reasons, and did the same to their nearest neighbours, the Irish, for the same reasons. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the British Empire further afield was no less exploitative. If it did not kill the natives on quite the same scale as the Spanish in the Americas, it nevertheless destroyed their institutions, their indigenous industries and their dignity with a callousness and sense of racial and cultural superiority that was to elicit a long and bitter nationalist and anti-imperialist backlash in the twentieth century…
In China, however, they came up against a nation that was much older than theirs, and a culture that was arguably, if we overlook its paganism, distinctly superior. Moreover, the Chinese were perhaps the only nation in the world that could rival the British in their sense of racial superiority… The clash between the two was therefore bound to have profound and long-lasting consequences…
Maria Hsia Chang writes: “It is difficult to imagine two civilizations more dissimilar than those of China and the West. Continental in proportion, agrarian China was insular and self-sufficient; industrial Western Europe was driven to export and championed free trade. Chinese culture deified authority and the group; Western civilization was rooted in individualism. Europeans were Judeo-Christians who regarded the Chinese, with their ancestor worship, as benighted pagans. Westerners believed in the rule of law, due process, and innocence until proven guilty; Chinese long opted for rule by Confucian ethics, in which the courts were a last recourse where the accused was presumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Although East and West were each other’s complete opposites, both were great and proud civilizations. The Chinese, an ancient people with a 5,000-year history, still thought they were the centre of the world; Westerners, with a civilization that reached back to Greco-Roman antiquity, found only confirmation of their superiority in their excursions across the globe. It does not take the gifts of a prophet to predict that contact between two such disparate civilizations could only lead to deadly conflict. Indeed, a British trader, writing in 1833 on the miserable trade conditions in China, ominously concluded that ‘war with the Chinese cannot be doubted’.”⁷³
The problem was that the West, and in particular Britain, wanted to trade with China, but the Chinese did not want to trade with the West. In what he saw as a magnanimous gesture, Emperor Kangxi (1662-1722) had allowed western merchants to trade within a kind of ghetto in Canton with a monopolistic group of Chinese merchants, the Thirteen Hongs. But the British, the “proudest” and “stiffest” of the westerners, found these restrictions “tiresome, insulting, and stultifying”.
“The China trade,” continues Chang, “had become important for both British consumers and their government. Until 1830, when India began the commercial cultivation of tea, tea could be bought only from China. In 1785, some 15 million pounds of Chinese tea a year were purchased by the British East India Company; tax on that tea accounted for a tenth of the British government’s total revenue. In 1795, and again in 1816, envoys were sent from London to prevail upon the Chinese emperor to improve trade conditions by lifting the restrictions in favor of a modern commercial treaty. Both missions, like the earlier Dutch effort, returned empty handed. To add fuel to fuel, the emperor treated the representatives of the British monarch with customary imperiousness, sublimely oblivious that he was dealing with a new breed of ‘barbarians’. That arrogance was only too evident in the letter to King George III from Emperor Qianlong (1736-1795), in response to the Macartney mission of 1795:
“’My capital is the hub and centre about which all quarters of the globe revolve… Our Celestial Empire possesses all thing in prolific abundance… [and has] no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians… But as the tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces, are absolute necessities to… yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal mark of favor, that foreign hongs should be established at Canton, so that… your country thus participate in our beneficence.’
“What the Chinese did not realize was that Britain had the power to force them into making trade concessions. But before force could be resorted to, a casus belli had to be found. That pretext was opium…”⁷⁴
“William Jardine and James Matheson,” writes Niall Ferguson, “were buccaneering Scotsmen who had set up a trading company in the southern Chinese port of Guangzhou (then known as Canton) in 1832. One of their best lines of business was importing government-produced opium from India. Jardine was a former East India Company surgeon, but the opium he was bringing into China was for distinctly non-medicinal purposes. This was a practice that the Emperor Yongzheng had prohibited over a century before, in 1729, because of the high social costs of opium addiction. On 10 March 1839 an imperial official named Lin Zexu arrived in Canton under orders from the Daoguang Emperor to stamp out the trade once and for all. Lin blockaded the Guangzhou opium godowns (warehouses) until the British merchants acceded to his demands. In all, around 20,000 chests of opium valued at £2 million were surrendered. The contents were adulterated to render it unusable and literally thrown into the sea. The Chinese also insisted that henceforth British subjects in Chinese territory should submit to Chinese law. This was not to Jardine’s taste at all. Known to the Chinese as ‘Iron-Headed Old Rat’, he was in Europe during the crisis and hastened to London to lobby the British government. After three meetings with the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Palmerston, Jardine seems to have persuaded him that a show of strength was required, and that ‘the want of power of their war junks’ would ensure an easy victory for a ‘sufficient’ British force. On 20 February 1840 Palmerston gave the order. By June 1840 all the naval preparations were complete. The Qing Empire was about the feel the full force of history’s most successful narco-state: the British Empire.
“Just as Jardine had predicted, the Chinese authorities were no match for British naval power. Guangzhou was blockaded, Chusan (Zhoushan) Island was captured. After a ten-month stand off, British marines seized the forts that guarded the mouth of the Pearl River, the waterway between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Under the Convention of Chuenpi, signed in January 1841 (but then repudiated by the Emperor), Hong Kong became a British possession. The Treaty of Nanking, signed a year later after another bout of one sided fighting, confirmed this cession and also gave free reign to the opium trade in five so-called treaty ports: Canton, Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningbo and Shanghai. According to the principle of extraterritoriality, British subjects could operate in these cities with complete immunity from Chinese law.” ⁷⁵
“Thereafter,” writes Chang, “the political integrity of China began to unravel. In 1844, without fighting a war, treaties were concluded with the United States and France that had effects more far-reaching than the Treaty of Nanjing. The Treaty of Wangxia with the United States introduced the most-favored-nation clause and the right of extraterritoriality, both of which had devastating impact on China’s well-being and sovereignty. The most-favored-nation clause extended all bilateral treaties between China and a foreign country to all other interested powers, thereby enabling the United States to obtain all the benefits that Britain had derived from the Treaty of Nanjing (excepting Hong Kong and the indemnity). The right of extraterritoriality, for its part, gave foreigners to China immunity from its laws and criminal justice system. Foreigners suspected of having committed crimes in China would be handed over to their consults for trial in accordance with their own country’s laws – which was rarely followed through in practice. More than that, the right of extraterritoriality was not mutual. Chinese immigrants in Western countries enjoyed no reciprocal legal immunity.
“France followed the United States by concluding the Treaty of Huangpu, which promptly invoked the most-favored-nation principle, thereby gaining for France every erstwhile concession obtained by Britain and the United States. Additionally, the Chinese agreed to lift their ban on Christianity, opening China to proselytization by French and other Western missionaries.”⁷⁶
The Second Anglo-Chinese War (1856-60), which ended with the sack of Peking and the Treaty of Tianjin, inflicted still greater humiliation on China. More cities were opened to foreign trade, and westerners took over China’s maritime customs. British cotton exports to China – one of Britain’s main aims – multiplied. As did the export of opium… British “free” trade had been imposed on the world’s greatest non-Christian empire at the point of a gun…
*
“For China,” writes Ferguson, “the first Opium War ushered in an era of humiliation. Drug addiction exploded. Christian missionaries destabilized traditional Chinese beliefs. And in the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion – a peasant revolt against a discredited dynasty led by the self-proclaimed younger brother of Christ – between 20 and 40 million people lost their lives.”⁷⁷
That the leader of the Taiping Rebellion should call himself the brother of Jesus Christ was a sign of another kind of western influence, this time religious. However, this Christian influence, however perverted, was mixed with other, communistic ideas. Thus J.M. Roberts writes: “The basis of Taiping society was communism: there was no private property but communal provision for general needs. The land was in theory distributed for working in plots graded by quality to provide just shares. Even more revolutionary was the extension of social and educational equality to women. The traditional binding of their feet was forbidden and a measure of sexual austerity marked the movement’s aspirations (though not the conduct of the ‘Heavenly King’ himself). These things reflected the mixture of religious and social elements which lay at the root of the Taiping cult and the danger it presented to the traditional order.”⁷⁸
Such elements might lead one to think that this rebellion was undertaken under the direct influence of the West, being an eastern offshoot of the European Age of Revolution. But this would be a mistake, according to Jacques Gernet, insofar as Hung “was only following in the footsteps of other rebel leaders and usurpers who had been regarded as reincarnations of Maitreya, the saviour Buddha… This view fails to recognize the role played by heterodox religions in the big rebellions of Chinese history and the opposition – a basic factor in China – between the official cults, patronized by the legitimate authority, and the religious practices frowned on by the state (yin-ssu). Taoism, Buddhism, and Manicheism all provided popular risings with the messianic hope of a world at peace, harmony, and general prosperity; the Christianity of the T’ai P’ing comes into the same category.”⁷⁹
Be that is may, it is intriguing that this enormous rebellion, together with the later rebellions it gave rise to, resulting in no less than 20 million deaths (although only a small proportion of these were deaths in battle), should have taken place at just the time when western ideas were beginning to enter into China. Some causal link seems highly probable. Thus we may agree with the judgement of Eric Hobsbawm that “these convulsions were in important respects the direct product of the western impact on China.
“Perhaps alone among the great traditional empires of the world, China possessed a popular revolutionary tradition, both ideological and practical. Ideologically its scholars and its people took the permanence and centrality of their Empire for granted: it would always exist, under an emperor (except for occasional interludes of division), administered by the scholar-bureaucrats who had passed the great national civil service examinations introduced almost two thousand years before – and only abandoned when the Empire itself was about to die in 1916. Yet its history was that of a succession of dynasties each passing, it was believed, through a cycle of rise, crisis and supersession: gaining and eventually losing that ‘mandate of Heaven’ which legitimise their absolute authority. In the process of changing from one dynasty to the next, popular insurrection, growing from social banditry, peasant risings and the activities of popular secret societies to major rebellion, was known and expected to play a significant part. Indeed its success was itself an indication that the ‘mandate of Heaven’ was running out. The permanence of China, the centre of world civilisation, was achieved through the ever-repeated cycle of dynastic change, which included this revolutionary element.
“The Manchu dynasty, imposed by northern conquerors in the mid-seventeenth century, had thus replaced the Ming dynasty, which had in turn (through popular revolution) overthrown the Mongol dynasty in the fourteenth century. Though in the first half of the nineteenth century the Manchu regime still seemed to function intelligently and effectively – thought it was said with an unusual amount of corruption – there had been signs of crisis and rebellion since the 1790s. Whatever else they may have been due to, it seems clear that the extraordinary increase of the country’s population during the past century (whose reasons are still not fully elucidated) had begun to create acute economic pressures. The number of Chinese is claimed to have risen from around 140 million in 1741 to about 400 million in 1834. The dramatic new element in the situation of China was the western conquest, which had utterly defeated the Empire in the first Opium War (1839-42). The shock of this capitulation to a modest naval force of the British was enormous, for it revealed the fragility of the imperial system, and even parts of popular opinion outside the few areas immediately affected may have become conscious of it. At all events there was a marked and immediate increase in the activities of various forces of opposition, notably the powerful and deeply rooted secret societies such as the Triad of south China, dedicated to the overthrow of the foreign Manchurian dynasty and the restoration of the Ming. The imperial administration had set up militia forces against the British, and thus helped to distribute arms among the civilian population. It only required a spark to produce an explosion.
“That spark was provided in the shape of an obsessed, perhaps psychopathic prophet and messianic leader, Hung Hsiu Chuan (1813-64), one of those failed candidates for the imperial Civil Service examination who were so readily given to political discontent. After his failure at the examination he evidently had a nervous breakdown, which turned into a religious conversion. Around 1847-8 he founded a ‘Society of those who venerate God’, in Kwangsi province, and was rapidly joined by peasants and miners, by men from the large Chinese population of pauperised vagrants, by members of various national minorities and by supporters of the older secret societies. Yet there was one significant novelty in his preaching. Hung had been influenced by Christian writings, had even spent some time with an American missionary in Canton, and thus embodied significant western elements in an otherwise familiar mixture of anti-Manchu, heretico-religious and social-revolutionary ideas. The rebellion broke out in 1850 in Kwangsi and spread so rapidly that a ‘Celestial Realm of Universal Peace’ could be proclaimed within a year with Hung as the supreme ‘Celestial King’. It was unquestionably a regime of social revolution, whose major support lay among the popular masses, and dominated by Taoist, Buddhist and Christian ideas of equality. Theocratically organised on the basis of a pyramid of family units, it abolished private property (land being distributed only for use, not ownership), established the equality of the sexes, prohibited tobacco, opium and alcohol, introduced a new calendar (including a seven-day week) and various other cultural reforms, and did not forget to lower taxes. By the end of 1853, the Taipings with at least a million active militants controlled most of south and east China and had capture Nanking, though failing - largely for want of cavalry – to push effectively into the north. China was divided, and even those parts not under Taiping rule were convulsed by major insurrections such as those of the Nien peasant rebels in the north, not suppressed until 1868, the Miao national minority in Kweichow, and other minorities in the south-west and north-west.
“The Taiping revolution did not maintain itself, and was in fact unlikely to. Its radical innovations alienated moderates, traditionalists and those with property to lose – by no means only the rich – the failure of its leaders to abide by their own puritanical standards weakened its popular appeal, and deep divisions within the leadership soon developed. After 1856 it was on the defensive, and in 1864 the Taiping capital of Nanking was recaptured. The imperial government recovered, but the price it paid for recovery was heavy and eventually proved fatal. It also illustrated the complexities of the western impact.
“Paradoxically the rulers of China had been rather less ready to adopt western innovations than the plebeian rebels, long used to living in an ideological world in which unofficial ideas drawn from foreign sources (such as Buddhism) were acceptable. To the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats who governed the empire what was not Chinese was barbarian. There was even resistance to the technology which so obviously made the barbarians invincible. As late as 1867 Grand Secretary Wo Jen memorialised the throne’s warning that the establishment of a college for teaching astronomy and mathematics would ‘make the people proselytes of foreignism’ and result ‘in the collapse of uprightness and the spread of wickedness’, and resistance to the construction of railways and the like remained considerable. For obvious reasons a ‘modernising’ party developed, but one may guess that they would have preferred to keep the old China unchanged, merely adding to it the capacity to produce western armaments. (Their attempts to develop such production in the 1860s were not very successful for that reason.) The powerless imperial administration in any case saw itself with little but the choice between different degrees of concession to the west. Faced with a major social revolution, it was even reluctant to mobilise the enormous force of Chinese popular xenophobia against the invaders. Indeed, the overthrow of the Taiping seemed politically by far its most urgent problem, and for this purpose the help of the foreigners was, if not essential, then at any rate desirable; their good-will was indispensable. Thus imperial China found itself tumbling rapidly into complete dependence on the foreigners. An Anglo-French-American triumvirate had controlled the Shanghai customs since 1854, but after the second Opium War (1856-8) and the sack of Peking (1860) which ended with total capitulation, an Englishman actually had to be appointed ‘to assist’ in the administration of the entire Chinese customs revenue. In practice Robert Hart, who was Inspector General of Chinese Customs from 1863 until 1909, was the master of the Chinese economy and, though he came to be trusted by the Chinese governments and to identify himself with the country, in effect the arrangement implied the entire subordination of the imperial government to the interests of the westerners.”⁸⁰