When Trade Wars Turned Bloody: The Opium War with Stephen Platt
ChinaTalk
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Linz a Shoe and the Opium War
In Linz a shoe, the man who led the crackdown at Canton is the reason for the war breaking out. He's remembered as this uncompromising enemy of opium and an upstanding moralist. But he actually goes on record saying about opium in 1833, several years before the opium war. The huge miscalculation that makes this war possible is that Charles Eliot gets into his head that if they don't bring back all of their opium and give it to Linzos Chiu, he's sure that they are going to get their heads chopped off.
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