What else can the British sell to China

It's well known that the Opium Wars occurred in a large way because opium was the only good the British could sell to get enough speccie to buy Chinese goods they wanted. It seems to me it is extremely implausible there was nothing else at all the Chinese would be interested in, and I put down the situation more to lack of imagination by British merchants.

So, what else could some entrepreneurial Brit come up with that the Chinese would want in large amounts during the early 1800s?
 
There were lots of things the Chinese people were interested in. The problem was the Chinese Emperor stopped most of it, claiming it wasn't needed.
According to the Emperor and his supporters the only thing they needed from Britain was silver and gold.
 
The British tried selling other things; cotton, exotic woods, feathers, spices, and IIRC bird nests.

(If the Ming remainopen, I coudl see Bengal ending up as a monoculture ecnoomy for Shanghai's textile mills).

The problem wasn't that the chinese didn't like technological products. The problem was that they made clocks of their own, glasses of their own, and textiles weren't economical.

And there were hundreds of thousands of Chinese in southeast Asia, who were already supplying a lot of the goods that the inscrutable Chinee wanted.
 
There were plenty of luxury goods and tools that would have been useful to many people in China at the time, the problem was that either those potential customers could not afford to buy them, or that they were not allowed to.

In the first category would be things like steam pumps and steel tools. A steam pump would be fantastically useful to a mine owner, but the cost of transporting more than a few such machines 2/3 the way across the world would make them prohibitive. Steel tools produced in Sheffield and other British industrial centers were cheaper, and probably of higher quality than those produced domestically in China, but the workmen who would actually be able to use them would never be able to afford them.

In the second category would be firearms. It would not be prohibitively expensive to export rifled muskets and light artillery pieces from Great Britain to China. However, the Imperial Court had little interest in buying such weapons, due to the decentralized organization of their military, but also, more importantly, the destabilizing effect on Chinese society such imports would conceivably have. This was unfortunate from the long term, because the Chinese could produce gunpowder, so the importation of muskets could have quickly stimulated a local industry.

Opium was in many ways an ideal commodity for the British to trade the Chinese. Rather than transporting goods directly to China, English merchants could instead, using the same ships, transport and sell goods in India, and use some of the profits to buy opium, which they could then transport to the Chinese on the same ships. Both the physical capital (the ships) and the owners investment capital were used more efficiently by first selling to the Indians and then to the Chinese.

This could also have functioned with other goods produced in India that were in demand in China. The problem was that, in a pre-industrial China, there was simply very little produced in India that was in demand in China. Tea and ceramics were produced in India and used in China, but the Chinese domestic production was sufficient to meet local demand. Luxury textile goods faced the same problem.

The only real alternative to Opium would have to be some kind of light, easily transportable good such as spice that could cultivated in India and that was in demand in China. However, even if such a spice existed, the Quing Emperors probably would have opposed it as soon as they realized that an unfavorable balance of trade meant an outflow of China's gold and silver, something they viewed as unacceptable. Any attempt to restrict trade between the British Merchants and the China would likely precipitate an intervention, or a war by the British/French.
 
Another probem British traders faced was that many items they bought to China were snapped up quickly first time, but by the time they could get back, the locals had learned to make their own at a cheaper price
 
In the first category would be things like steam pumps and steel tools. A steam pump would be fantastically useful to a mine owner, but the cost of transporting more than a few such machines 2/3 the way across the world would make them prohibitive.

Were there mines in China at this point where steam pumps would have been useful? IIRC the major problem the Chinese had in coal mines was that they were too try, not that they flooded.


In the second category would be firearms. It would not be prohibitively expensive to export rifled muskets and light artillery pieces from Great Britain to China. However, the Imperial Court had little interest in buying such weapons, due to the decentralized organization of their military, but also, more importantly, the destabilizing effect on Chinese society such imports would conceivably have.

Well, the other question is who did the Qing need to use them against? Circa 1800 they were supreme in East Asia.
 
Were there mines in China at this point where steam pumps would have been useful? IIRC the major problem the Chinese had in coal mines was that they were too try, not that they flooded.


I don't have any specific data, but I am assuming that a steam pump would allow a coal mine to be worked longer and more efficiently. Unless coal is present in China in deposits dramatically different than in northern England and West Virginia.

Which is not to say that if labor was cheap enough and near-surface deposits were common enough that a steam pump still be a good invention.

Well, the other question is who did the Qing need to use them against? Circa 1800 they were supreme in East Asia.

The Annamese warlords, steppe nomads, restive uighurs. There were real and potential enemies that could be more effectively dealt with using more modern firearms than the hopelessly antiquated matchlocks the Chinese were using at the start of the 19th century.

Of course, given that the Imperial Court did not really have a centralized military organization at this time, it would be more likely up to the individual generals to arm the troops in a more modern fashion. And individual generals and local notables did not really have the capital, or, more importantly, the motive for acquiring more modern weapons.

I agree with your earlier post: there was very little in the way of raw materials and luxury goods that the Chinese demanded that could not already be supplied by enterprising Chinese merchants operating in Southeast Asia and even further afield. I am suggesting that there was at least a latent demand for European capital goods and weapons, but that it was not practical for the Europeans to meet it before the Chinese market was forcibly opened up to the outside world after the Opium Wars.
 
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