ions with Britain, or anyone else, as seen in the rejection of the Macartney mission in 1793 As a result, diplomatic mechanisms for negotiation and resolution were missing. Michael Greenberg locates the inevitable cause in the momentum for more and more overseas trade in Britain's expanding modern economy. On the other hand, the economic forces inside Britain that were war hawks—Radicals in Parliament, and northern merchants and manufacturers—were a political minority and needed allies, especially Palmerston, before they could get their war. In Parliament the Melbourne government faced a host of complex international threats including the Chartist riots at home, bothersome budget deficits, unrest in Ireland, rebellions in Canada and Jamaica, war in Afghanistan, and French threats to British business interests in Mexico and Argentina. The opposition demanded more aggressive answers, and it was Foreign Minister Palmerston who set up an easy war to solve the political crisis. It was not economics, or opium sales or expanding trade that caused the British to go to war, Melancon argues, it was more a matter of upholding aristocratic standards of national honour sullied by Chinese insults.
One historiographical problem is that the emphasis on the British causal factors tends to ignore the Chinese. The Manchu rulers were focused on internal unrest by Chinese elements, and paid little attention to the minor issues happening in Canton. Historian James Polachek argues the reasons for trying to suppress the opium trade had to do with internal factionalism led by a purification-oriented group of literary scholars who paid no attention to the risk of international intervention by much more powerful military forces. Therefore, it was not a matter of inevitable conflict between contrasting worldviews. Lin and the Daoguang Emperor, comments historian Jonathan Spence, "seemed to have believed that the citizens of Canton and the foreign traders there had simple, childlike natures that would respond to firm guidance and statements of moral principles set out in simple, clear terms." Neither considered the possibility that the British government would be committed to protecting the smugglers.
Contemporaneous Qing-dynasty wars:
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to First Opium War.|