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The Inner Opium War
by James Polachek
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Only a few of us seek immortality, and fewer still by writing. But Arthur Inman challenged the odds. He calculated that if he kept a diary and spared no thoughts or actions, was entirely honest and open, and did not care about damage or harm to himself or others, he would succeed in gaining attention beyond the grave that he could not attain in life. The diary became a many-layered and strikingly animated work of a gifted writer, by turns charming, repellent, shocking, cruel, and comical. But the diary is also an uninhibited history of his times, of his eccentricities and fantasies, of his bizarre marriage arrangements and sexual adventures. Inman's explorations of his own troubled nature made him excessively curious about the secret lives of others.…
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"I chose this book to contrast with Peter Ward Fay’s, because of its immersion in the Chinese side of the story. Polachek behaves a little like a detective in this book, picking his way through an intricate, opaque mass of internal Chinese sources, policy debates and abstruse connections between members of the imperial bureaucracy – which make you think that not very much has changed in Chinese politics over the last 150 years. The Opium War in both Chinese and Western historiography has taken on a momentous significance as an almost mystically pre-destined clash between the two big civilisations of China and Great Britain. Polachek, by contrast, argues amongst other things that the Opium War was triggered by Chinese policy makers in a fit of bureaucratic haste. Many of the key policy makers in China were too busy worrying about domestic issues to size up the new British enemy on their maritime borders. Very few top-level officials had actually thought through the implications of the Qing crackdown on opium in the 1830s on relations with Great Britain. So, in Polachek’s account, the Opium War becomes an almost accidental occurrence."