Comment by thuridas
3 years ago
This reminds me of the East India Company: forcing China to buy opium even if it really harmed both its population and economy.
Indian may not be too happy with all the Marathas wars and colonization.
Anyway, is not a matter of which is the worse but of how can we get the best from both of them
The East India Company didn’t directly even ship opium to China, that was all done by private merchants.
And in any case initially it wasn’t so much about opium as about free trade in general. The British would’ve been fine with selling textiles, tools and other stuff to the Chinese people who wanted to buy them. Opium was just much easier to smuggle than anything else.