Abstract
The British took some time to understand all that, for once the Treaty of Nanjing was signed, China again fell below London’s political horizon. For the rest of the decade, British politics focused on domestic issues of the first importance, like church affairs or social problems. Probably the most urgent of all was the question of food supplies and agricultural protection, highlighted by potato and corn blights which led, among other things, to large-scale starvation in Ireland. Then Peel’s government managed to repeal the Corn Laws, and so dismantle a critical barrier to food imports. That achievement broke his Tory party for a generation.
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Notes
Palmerston, private letter of 9 Jan. 1847 to Davis, extracts in Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England 1830–1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p.274; also Bulwer, The Life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, vol.11I, pp.376–8.
Nathan A. Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office (New York: American Institute of Pacific Relations, 1948), pp.15–17.
Sir Clement Jones, Chief Officer in China 1840–1853 (Liverpool: Charles Birchall and Sons, 1955), pp.70–1.
Frances Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843–1943 (London: John Murray, 1998), p.276.
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Comments from Baron Gros, in Henri Cordier, L’Expedition de Chine 1857–58 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1905), p.406n1.
Hurd, Douglas, The Arrow War: An Anglo-Chinese Confusion 1856–60 (London: Collins, 1967), p.228.
G.J. Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (London: Longman, Green, 1862), p.227.
Letter of 25 Nov. 1861 to Captain Butler, Guernsey, quoted in Alain Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilizations (London: Harvill, 1993), p.530.
Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin, ed. T. Walrond (London: John Murray, 1872), pp.213, 232.
Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, The Story of a Soldier’s Life, 2 vols (London: Archibald Constable, 1903), vol.2, p.2.
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© 2004 Harry G. Gelber
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Gelber, H.G. (2004). Clashes Continue: Britain and China after the War. In: Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000704_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000704_9
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