The Surprisingly Violent History of Tea (Documentary)
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- Опубликовано: 2 май 2024
- THE OPIUM WARS - China and Britain are engaged in History's largest duel as Britain forces upon China deadly opium against their will, all with the goal of winning access to the tea trade.This is an underappreciated chapter of history that involves the colonization of India, and the beginnings of massive global trade having major effects on wars and people around the world, and the eventual settling of the world order that we are largely still experiencing today. But also there's some silly things to be learned about tea.
(thx for watching, much love. Hope you enjoy)
Holy crap, the Mists of Pandaria soundtrack in the background really made it hard to concentrate on the awesome narration due to sheer nostalgia. Anyway, fantastic video!
Loved it, very good! 👍🏽
I don't know much about the topic, so seeing that opium addiction is still a current epidemic was a little jarring (almost felt anachronistic). Maybe it's my own western bias but it feels like an understated problem that I never hear much about. Great video!
Great video!
I've been consuming 'Purple Voodoo' at ~$50 for 200g cake.
Caffeine is as much a narcotic as opium. That’s not a judgement-in the basic sense of psychoactive substances. Anti-drug enforcement is always focused on the supply side, but never stops to ask what the drug is doing for the user. For 18th century china, it only took combining the harsh reality of 18th century life anywhere with a several millennia old culture of prioritizing group survival and harmony over individual welfare. Today China is still battling with large swaths of social disengagement, they’re just not hopped up on dope. This is why they cracked down on video games. The EIC lucked out by finding a market, but to say exploited really washes over cultural forces and robs people of their agency.
China has no problem shipping pre-cursors for Fentynal to the west.
你们不如先管一管乱开药的医生，真打算大力度禁芬太尼的话中国又不可能再过来打一场芬太尼战争
China is not responsible for your pathetic laws. Don't mix up purposeefully sending drugs by the British drug lords vs American companies buying fentanyl to promote opiods for their own profits.
To call Britain a small regional power and China one of the most powerful countries in the world is laughably ignorant on the topic. Britain colonized numerous countries and large swathes of several continents at this point. Britain had already colonized the new world. While China controlled little more than the land we would call China today and few neighboring territories. Also you make it sound as if the British colonized Indian with this goal in mind, and completely fail to mention that it had already been colonized by the Portuguese before them. And I’ve barely started the video……..
China had 30% of the world's population and a similar amount of GDP at the turn of the 18th century. The Qing Dynasty from 1700-1800 was the most prosperous period China had ever felt, relative to the rest of the world. It was incredibly powerful, and it saw itself as the center of the world (right or not). The "New World" was irrelevant compared to China, until the mid 1800s at the earliest. Portugal's domain over India was limited to a few coastal cities like Goa and Daman; it was nothing compared to the vast swathes of territory in Bengal at the British East India Company ended up taking in the 1750s-1790s.
Britain had lots of fantastic advantages underpinning it, but as of the early 19th century had not really proven itself globally beyond regional European matters. Britain has a really good marketing team. It was a competitive player, but paled in comparison to China with tis 100s of millions of people (until it started industrialising, and then the events of the video happened).
Anyway, the Opium Wars were shocking. China had no big reasons to expect they couldn't stop the British, but they underestimated technology.
I brought up the new world, as well as all of the other British colonies, to refute the videos claim that it was a regional power. They were one of the only countries that resemble what we would call a world power today.
I do agree with you that China was populous and had a large
economy. But that doesn’t directly equate to power. They were a regional power at best, with little actual influence over other countries beyond the economic.