"Friendship or Hostility, Trade or War”: The 1832 Voyage of the Lord Amherst

Abstract:

My thesis follows the voyage of the ship Lord Amherst in 1832 along the Chinese coast led by Hugh Hamilton Lindsay from the East India Company (EIC), and examines how, through various interactions at the very frontiers of two empires, people like Lindsay observed and concluded about the nature of government, law, commerce, and national character of the subjects of the “Celestial Empire.” It tells the story from the perspectives of the Select Committee of EIC in Canton, of merchants like Lindsay who were anticipating the end of EIC’s monopoly, of the Chinese officials in the port cities they visited, and of the Court of Directors of EIC and British politicians in London. What I hope to portray, in the various strands of narratives of and attitudes toward the voyage, is the process through which the different visions of the relations between war, peace, and trade were formed when the future held much uncertainty and possibility, and their complex roots in a mix of British ideas of political philosophy and moral considerations. The exchange of information and opinions among the characters of this story continued well into and beyond the Opium War, and so did the competition of these different views.