Treaty of Nanjing

About the Author

Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, was the foreign secretary of Great Britain during the Opium War. In this capacity he directed foreign policy for Queen Victoria, whose signature ratified the treaty, and he was the immediate superior of Sir Henry Pottinger, who signed as the British plenipotentiary. Lord Palmerston was, in a practical sense, the “author” of this document, if not the architect of the Opium War itself. A living emblem of British imperialism, Palmerston spent nearly sixty years in public life promoting the cause of British imperial power. He began his career as a conservative Tory, but coming of age in post-Napoleonic Europe, a time of dynamic political change, he came to embrace the spirit of nineteenth-century modernity, including its assumptions that economic efficiency and political reform were the keys to modern state power. At the height of his career, his thinking was more classically liberal than traditionally conservative, and his approach to the cultivation of Great Britain's strength was both rational and practical. Palmerston's reformist sentiments occasionally came into conflict with his imperial aspirations. In the 1830s, as the conflict between the Qing court and British trade merchants began to escalate over the issue of opium trading, Palmerston was less than enthusiastic about supporting merchants who violated Chinese laws. This position changed quickly when Commissioner Lin began arresting British subjects and confiscating British property in 1839. Palmerston made the decision to deploy a naval task force against China and was persistent in pressing for a settlement that optimized Britain's interests.