Extraterritorial Publication and American Missionary Authority about the ‘Opium War’: Contesting the Eloquence and Reciprocity of John Quincy Adams’s ‘Lecture on the War with China’

Abstract

The US missionaries Elijah Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams leveraged authority from extraterritorial printing in South China to rebut the oratorical eloquence of ex-President John Quincy Adams on the First Opium War. They did this by editing Adams’s ‘Lecture on the War with China’ (1841) for The Chinese Repository that they published monthly from Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong. Adams presents the British as righteous Christians defending ‘free trade’ from pagan China. The missionaries’ editorial strategies challenged Adams on points of fact to signal disagreement with him over the moral implications of opium smuggling and China’s status under international law.