Friday, January 11th, 2013 Precarious Empire: Revisiting the Opium War and Its Implications

Description

The talk re-examines the famous Anglo-Chinese War in 1839-1842 (better known as the First Opium War) in the context of nineteenth-century globalization and international conflicts. Studied here as a classic scandal of empire, the Opium War illustrates the precarious and contradictory ideological foundation of the modern empire and international law. The intense debates over the opium trade and the war in the British Parliament, mercantile community, evangelical circles, and mass media unexpectedly exposed the morally and legally questionable origins of empire. They also revealed the complicated processes by which the presumed but contested universality of the colonial empire and civilization was finally institutionalized by the post-war treatises and positivist international law. Many of the legal, moral, cultural, and political-economic arguments deployed in 1839-1843 for or against empire remain uncannily similar to what we hear in the twenty-first century.

Li Chen is Assistant Professor of History and Global Asia Studies in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies (UTSC) and the Graduate Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research interests focus on late imperial and modern China, Sino-foreign relations, comparative legal history, international law, and critical studies of empire, modernity, and globalization. The talk is based on part of his recently completed book project “Precarious Empire: Law, Sovereignty, and Cultural Politics in the Sino-Western Encounter, c.1740s-c.1840s.”