In the mid-19th century, the British addiction to the dangerous drug known as ‘tea’ created a massive trade imbalance with Qing China. No, really. British taste for tea (and porcelain, and silk) caused an immense amount of silver to flow into China. Like any good merchant, the British simply figured out what good Qing China desired in turn in order to rectify this trade imbalance! Unfortunately, China had little interest in allowing British consumer goods into their markets, and Chinese elites had little taste for British artisan goods.
Luckily, the British stumbled on opium as a desirable trade good! And with their control over India, the Brits set to growing opium in massive amounts and flooding China’s markets with it!
For obvious reasons, when it became apparent that Britain was becoming the trashiest world empire and basing their trade relations on drug dealing, Qing China was not pleased, and restricted imports to destroy the opium trade, the abundance of which had caused opium addiction to become widespread by the drastic drop in price by the increased supply.
Britain did not like this, and decided war was an acceptable solution to keep drug dealing to the Chinese. They won. Twice. And extorted some exorbitant concessions in addition to guarantees for their drug trade.
Lol, China doing the exact same thing today - sell everyone else a bunch of stuff, take the money, but refuse imports to the greatest extent they can manage.
Can you really call it a single 4k+ year old civilization?
Given that they tended to do complete sweeps when they changed dynasties, to the point that almost all of the info around Zheng He’s treasure ships (circa 1500) was almost erased from existence insidw what is now China.
Or that the “Great Wall of China” was mostly built to keep slightly different Chinese (and Mongolians) out of “their” China.
It was a joint effort. The classic saying “WWII was won with British intelligence, American manufacturing and Soviet blood”. Neither of the three would’ve been able to do it alone.
Of course the losses were disproportionate, America gained massively economically from the war while Russia and Britain sustained losses.
Explanation:
Lol, China doing the exact same thing today - sell everyone else a bunch of stuff, take the money, but refuse imports to the greatest extent they can manage.
Can you really call it a single 4k+ year old civilization?
Given that they tended to do complete sweeps when they changed dynasties, to the point that almost all of the info around Zheng He’s treasure ships (circa 1500) was almost erased from existence insidw what is now China.
Or that the “Great Wall of China” was mostly built to keep slightly different Chinese (and Mongolians) out of “their” China.
The written language and culture were pretty much unchanged since the qin dynasty. So it’s largely the same civilization.
True, but then you can’t very well claim that civilisation was blown up given how it very much survived and thrived afterwards.
The empire on the other hand…
They even made a bank to store all that opium money: HSBC.
Open the country. Stop making it be closed.
e: corrected
Knock knock
I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF *checks notes* HAVING DEFEATED THE NAZIS!! *starts playing WW2 documentary*
Was it not the Soviets that did that? But I’m sure there’s some aristocratic British twat that would like to take credit for it.
It was a joint effort. The classic saying “WWII was won with British intelligence, American manufacturing and Soviet blood”. Neither of the three would’ve been able to do it alone. Of course the losses were disproportionate, America gained massively economically from the war while Russia and Britain sustained losses.
True. Figures if you’re getting your ass blitzed by an opponent you’ll have the most inside knowledge on them.
Many nations were liberated thanks to the Nazi spanking of the Brits, as evil as the Nazis were.
The Brits were starving the colonies then (ie. comitting genocide), akin to the current day starvation of Gazans by Zionists.
The world is an interesting and complicated place. Amazing how good can come from evil, even if unintended.