The Myth of the ‘Opium War’

STEPHEN R. PLATT believes that the so-called Opium War of 1839–1842 was one of the most “shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history.” The central question, he writes in Imperial Twilight, is a moral one: How could Britain—a country that had just abolished slavery—so hypocritically turn around and push drugs onto “a defenceless China”?

Platt, a University of Massachusetts Amherst historian, thus joins a long list of writers who have portrayed the Opium War as one of the worst crimes of the modern era. Karl Marx, for one, believed that the slave trade was merciful compared to the opium trade. Forty years ago, John King Fairbank, doyen of modern Chinese studies, called