Joseph Whitwell Pease and the Quaker Role in the Campaign to Suppress the Opium Trade in the British Empire

Abstract

JOSEPH WHITWELL PEASE AND THE QUAKER ROLE IN THE CAMPAIGN TO SUPPRESS THE OPIUM TRADE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE By John V. Crangle* Joseph Whitewell Pease1 was the most prominent opponent of the opium traffic in the British Empire during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Assuming in 1881 the leadership of the London-based Anglo-Indian Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (S.S.O.T.), he effectively elucidated the moral implications of governmental commerce in the drug in Asia, making the trade the subject of one of the most publicized debates of the period. Before it was over the controversy involved prime ministers and prelates, intellectuals and civil servants, and Liberals and Tories. Ultimately, the anti-opiumists triumphed; their adversaries , who had counted among their number cabinet members and viceroys, went down to defeat; in 1907 Parliament initiated the legislative suppression of the oriental opium trade. The opposition to Britain's implication in the commerce started on a small scale and dated from the First Opium War (18391842 ).2 During the war the Emperor of China was praised in England for desiring to exclude opium from his dominions,3 and "the sin of the opium trade" was blamed upon Britain.4 However , not much progress was made until after the middle of the century. The Society of Friends showed an early interest in the matter. In 1858 its Meeting for Sufferings condemned the opium trade for its "grievous results as regards the inhabitants of both India and China, greatly to the reproach of this professedly Christian *John V. Crangle is Associate Professor of History at Benedict College, Columbia, South Carolina. 1.Joseph Whitwell Pease (1818-1903), the son of the famous railway pioneer Edward Pease of Darlington, was director and chairman of businesses in coal, manufacturing, iron, and railways in the north of England. He was president of the Peace Society, an opponent of capital punishment, a partisan of Home Rule, and Liberal M.P. (1865-1903). D.N.B., 1901-1911, p. 90; obituary, Times, June 24, 1903, p. 12; Who Was Who, 1897-1916, p. 554. 2.David Nelson Rowe, Modern China (New York: Van Nostrana, 1959), pp. 18-19. 3.Editorials on the Opium War, Dublin University Magazine, (May, 1840), pp. 40,89,593. 4.Alfred Mallalieu, "War with China and the Opium Question," Blackwood 's Edinburgh Magazine, XLVII (March, 1840), p. 380. 63 64QUAKER HISTORY nation." A memorial was forwarded to the First Lord of the Treasury which stated : We cannot reflect without deep sorrow on the part our countrymen have taken in originating and carrying on this immoral traffic. We must regard it as incompatible with the maintenance of those principles of religion and morality which this nation professes to uphold.5 Other Non-Conformists welcomed the Quaker announcement. The Record wrote, "So thoroughly convinced of the iniquitousness of the East India Company's opium traffic, and of the great and persevering efforts that will be required to obtain its suppression , that we welcome these new allies into the field." The paper expressed the hope that anti-opiumists would "keep the matter incessantly before the Christian public."6 Major reformers supported suppression. Lord Shaftesbury,7 the famous factory reformer, moved a resolution in parliament in 1843 against the trade which denounced it as "destructive of all relations of amity between England and China . . . and utterly inconsistent with the honour and duties of a Christian kingdom."8 The Radical, Sir Wilfred Lawson,9 unsuccessfully moved a resolution in 1870 "that this House condemns the system by which a large portion of the Indian Revenue is raised from opium . . ."10 The foundation of the Anglo-Indian Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade in 1874 gave the cause an organizational basis. Founded by the Darlington industrialist Edward Pease,11 a brother of Joseph Whitwell Pease, the S.S.O.T. established a headquarters in London whence it issued a flood of publications and directed a nation-wide program of agitation. The S.S.O.T. made considerable progress during the late 1870's in conjunction with the Society of Friends (an alliance made easy by the fact that certain key...