The two Opium Wars, fought from 1839-1842 and 1856-1860, have been understood by the Chinese as the beginning of their "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of Western powers, most notably Britain.
Early in the nineteenth century, an insatiable appetite for Chinese goods, such as tea, silk and china, led Britain into a trade deficit with China. To combat that, Britain significantly increased its opium trade with China. It used opium from India, which it controlled, to finance its purchases of Chinese goods. The Chinese government, seeing the extent to which opium addiction was affecting its people, decided to enforce its ban on the opium trade. In turn, England found excuses to go to war with China and easily defeated the badly weakened country. It then imposed harsh and humiliating treaties on the Chinese, which included payment of indemnities and forcing the Chinese to cede Hong Kong to the British. Although Britain, at the time the premier world power, spearheaded the effort, other Western powers also made lucrative inroads into China.
The Opium Wars could be seen as a moral low point for Britain in its zest to exploit the resources and peoples of other nations. The Chinese tried in vain to appeal to Queen Victoria to ban the sale of opium on moral grounds, and Gladstone, the British prime minister, decried the trade as evil.
The legacy of these two wars was years of distrust in China. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the country became communist and turned inward, taking control of its own destiny and growing into a major world power determined to protect its interests in Asia. The legacy also arguably impacted twentieth-century world politics: the English and French imposed similarly humiliating terms, the Versailles treaty, on the Germans after World War I, which did not go over well with Germany, and although the period of profitable imperialism was waning, Hitler waged war in part to build a similar empire to what the British had.
A map of the land trade route from Europe to Asia along the Silk Road. Image credit: M’ ships brought Europeans valuable goods, traveling between the port cities of western Europe and the East from the 10th century on along routes collectively labeled the Silk Road. However, transporting goods along the Silk Road was costly, slow, and unprofitable. Muslim middlemen collected taxes as the goods changed hands. Robbers waited to ambush treasure-laden caravans.
As well as seeking a water passage to the wealthy cities of the East, sailors wanted to find a route to the exotic and wealthy Spice Islands in modern-day Indonesia, whose location was kept secret by Muslim rulers. The lure of profit pushed explorers to seek new trade routes to the Spice Islands and to eliminate Muslim middlemen.
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Explanation: It is not possible to have a unique product in a purely competitive market, because A Purely Competitive Market is a market which has a broad range of competitors who produce the same product. This type of market structure is also called as the Perfect Competition
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Scientific inquiry is what differentiate history from myths, and popular folk tales.
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History refers to the empirical study of past events and the most important thing is the right approach while reconstructing the past phenomenons else one tends to end at the wrong conclusion. While studying history researchers not only look for sources but also critically examined the socio-political situation in which the source was created. And therefore one needs to apply scientific methods to cross-examine different historical sources before reaching a conclusion.
