ABSTRACT
From their inception in the late seventeenth century, Anglo-Chinese relations revolved around trade. Into an unimportant commercial area linked only by a small number of British merchants, the East India Company forged its success to China’s teas. Gunboat diplomacy served its purpose, and British commercial supremacy, together with indirect political influence, entrenched English power along the China coast and at Peking until the laeOs. Britain, however, felt the pressure of European industrial and commercial competition on a world-wide basis. By the early eighteenth century the East India Company had a permanent agency, or factory, outside the walls of the city of Canton, then for all practical purposes China’s only port open to foreign commerce. Economically, China had little interest in or need for manufactured products from England. The eighteen provinces of China proper and the three provinces of Manchuria covered a vast geographic area with a wide variety of climatic conditions for agricultural production.
