In this tragic and powerful story, the two Opium Wars of 1839??1842 and 1856??1860 between Britain and China are recounted for the first time through the eyes of the Chinese as well as the Imperial West. Opium entered China during the Middle Ages when Arab traders brought it into China for medicinal purposes. As it took hold as a recreational drug, opium wrought havoc on Chinese society. By the early nineteenth century, 90 percent of the Emperor's court and the majority of the army were opium addicts.
Britain was also a nation addicted-to tea, grown in China, and paid for with profits made from the opium trade. When China tried to ban the use of the drug and bar its Western smugglers from it gates, England decided to fight to keep open China's ports for its importation. England, the superpower of its time, managed to do so in two wars, resulting in a drug-induced devastation of the Chinese people that would last 150 years.
In this page-turning, dramatic and colorful history, The Opium Wars responds to past, biased Western accounts by representing the neglected Chinese version of the story and showing how the wars stand as one of the monumental clashes between the cultures of East and West.
"A fine popular account."-Publishers Weekly
"Their account of the causes, military campaigns and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre and deeply unsettling."-Booklist

This book provides a detailed examination of the role played by the Sudan Political Service in Anglo-Egyptian relations from the end of the Second World War, when Egypt formally demanded revision of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, through the conclusion of an Anglo-Egyptian Agreement on the Sudan in 1953 in the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution, and up to Sudanese independence in January 1956, on the eve of the Suez Crisis. Drawing on official documents and private papers, this study challenges conventional interpretations of British policy toward the Sudan and Egypt in this period, and it concludes that both the British Labour Government and its Conservative successor were prepared to make major concessions to Egypt in the Sudan in exchange for an acceptable treaty of alliance that would guarantee British access to the strategic Suez Canal Zone. It was the Sudan Government, the colonial administration dominated by British expatriate administrators, that stymied all efforts to achieve Anglo-Egyptian agreement at the expense of the Service's own plans for a fully-independent Sudanese state. This book will be of interest to researchers of British colonialism and modern Middle Eastern and African history.