(Un)Justifiable: British Imperial Security Culture & the Declaration of the First Opium War, 1830-1840.

Abstract

This thesis aims to show how British politics came to justify the First Opium War by examining British security interests, perceived threats, and practices, evaluating them through the concept of a British national imperial security culture, providing a new analytical perspective on the events leading up to the war. This national imperial security culture refers to mutually shared and commonly conflicting perceptions of national interests and threats concerning imperial ambition and preservation and the institutions and practices through which agents cooperate or compete upon these perceptions. This security culture defined British considerations in conducting diplomacy with the Qing dynasty. British national imperial security in China, throughout the 1830s, was characterized by fundamental security interests which were 1) the preservation, and preferably expansion of the volume of British trade in China, 2) the loosening of restrictions on said trade, and 3) the establishment of diplomatic ties between Britain and China, primarily to advocate for the former two points. These interests, in turn, influenced practices and threat perceptions. The prospects for pursuing British interests defined what practice, whether conciliatory or antagonistic, was incentivized. As I aim to show in this thesis’ chronology, as prospects worsened, an antagonistic approach to the Chinese authorities became more legitimate. The Chinese authorities, meanwhile, were treated as the primary perceived threat. The extent to which the authorities were viewed as obstructionist towards the pursuit of British interest, further shifted practices more towards antagonistic stances.