The Control of Opium and Anglo-American Relations before the WWI

Abstract

Alarmed at Filipinos picking up the practice of opium smoking from Chinese migrants in the Philippines at the time of the United States' colonization of the archipelago in 1898, the Americans took the initiative in holding international meetings to discuss the control of opium trafficking and smoking. This paper examines how Britain dealt with this development. Anti-opium advocates had been vocal in Britain since the 1870s, and the Liberal government's Secretary of State for India, John Morley, was known to be against the Indo-Chinese opium trade. The British House of Commons condemned the opium trade on 30 May 1906, and an Anglo-Chinese agreement to terminate it within ten years was concluded at the end of 1907. Yet Britain did not welcome the international meetings proposed by the United States, because it had gained enormous profits from the export of Indian opium, and colonial governments in East and South-east Asia relied heavily on revenues derived from opium. If the Empire were forced to control opium trafficking and smoking, it would have to intervene into the local society and its customs. This would conflict with the principle of British colonial rule: I. E., to gain as much economic profit as possible without intruding upon local society. Although Britain under the Liberal government did not intend to extract further concessions from China, it was not ready to revise existing treaties and agreements. It seemed to Britain that the Americans were offering their support to China in order to achieve their own goal of "open door" at the expense of Britain's existing interests. Britain tried to avoid international attention being focused solely on the opium question, by insisting that the subject should be examined from a broader point of view. At that time, morphine was mostly produced by British pharmacists, and cocaine by Germans. Britain's strategy resulted in bringing Anglo-German competition into the issue of the international control of drugs.