The Opium War

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1. chewzFeb 2018
   I recommend reading Opium Wars by Julia Lovell. [1]

   To answer your question - main lobbyst behind first Opium War was Scottish opium trader James Matheson [2]. The fortune he had made on selling opium to China had been invested in Rio Tinto[3] - mining company that survived till today.

   [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12147002-the-opium-war

   [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Matheson

   [3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Matheson_(industrialist...

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2. ptxFeb 2018
   > Julia Lovell, a British historian, makes a similar point. In her book “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China”, she says the move into opium by British traders was not, as claimed by many Chinese historians, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese. “It was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports,” she writes.

   Is there a name for this fallacy? It seems to come up a lot. I.e., when someone takes an action that has enormous and predictable negative effects for someone else and a comparatively tiny positive effect for themselves, they then argue along the lines that "I was motivated by my gain, not by your loss (even though I knew it would result from my action), so you have no right to complain!"

   In this case, it can be both a "deliberate conspiracy" and a "pragmatic response". They deliberately conspired to hurt the Chinese for profit, judging their suffering to be a less important consideration than their own profits.

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