Abstract This article uses the accounts of late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century British diplomats, statesmen and soldiers in China to reveal that British understandings of Qing China’s multi-ethnic empire were central to a series of Sino-British diplomatic encounters. In contrast to the dominant historiographical view that growing hostility to China in late eighteenth-century Britain directly informed the imperialism of the nineteenth century, this article demonstrates that Britons consistently paid attention to tensions between Han Chinese and the Manchus in their diplomatic encounters with the Qing from the Macartney embassy (1792–3) onwards. This resulted in some Britons viewing the Chinese as a civilised people who were similar to themselves and sympathetic to British aims of expanding trade, while the Manchus were dismissed as barbarian ‘Tartars’ who tyrannically oppressed the Chinese people and thwarted their natural propensity for commerce and progress. While this understanding of Qing China was at first only invoked to explain the failure of British diplomacy in China, it was increasingly used to legitimise calls for military action, arguing that a war against the Manchu Qing government was actually in the best interests of the Chinese people. Developed over an unfolding series of diplomatic encounters and, increasingly, confrontations, this legitimising framework was ultimately deployed as a justification for the First Opium War (1839–42).
Ross Moncrieff (Fri,) studied this question.