Merchants of War and Peace

Merchants of War and Peace challenges conventional arguments that the major driving forces of the First Opium War were the infamous opium smuggling trade, the defence of British national honour, and cultural conflicts between progressive' Britain and backward' China. Instead, it argues that the war was started by a group of British merchants in the Chinese port of Canton in the 1830s, known as the Warlike party'. Living in a period when British knowledge of China was growing rapidly, the Warlike