Opium Wars Opium Wars The Opium Wars were two wars in the mid-19th century involving China and the British Empire over the British trade of opium and China's sovereignty. The clashes included the First Opium War (1839–1842) and the Second Opium War (1856–1860). The wars and events between them weakened the Qing dynasty and forced China to trade with the other parts of the world. In 1820, China's economy was the largest in the world, according to British economist Angus Maddison. Within a decade after the end of the Second Opium War, China's share of global GDP had fallen by half. In
An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China nations, the collapse of China, British domination of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, malevolent misunderstanding between the West and the Third World in the twentieth." Other historians such as Joanna Waley-Cohen and Benjamin A. Elman argue for a more complex dynamic between England and China well into the 19th century. Kenneth Pomeranz refers to Staunton´s account to highlight the economic similarities between China and the West and argues that the Chinese disadvantage of energy-generating resources and the European access to the New World caused the divergence between East and West rather than cultural miscommunication. An Authentic Account of an