Two Approaches to the Study of the Opium War

The First Opium War is both a conventional starting point for modern Chinese history and an event readily reduced to political slogans. Mao Haijian’s The Qing Empire and the Opium War reconstructs the Qing military, intelligence, and decision-making processes behind the defeat; Julia Lovell’s The Opium War places the conflict within British imperial commerce and the politics of public memory. Reading the two books comparatively, this essay examines responsibility for defeat, the origins of the conflict, and the subsequent making and forgetting of war memory. It situates their arguments within the historiography of the First Opium War and considers both their contributions and limitations. The comparison shows how institutional failures in Qing governance and Britain’s imperial commercial interests can be treated as distinct but related explanatory levels, while later Chinese and British narratives reveal divergent processes of remembering and forgetting.