John Bowring's Story

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John Bowring’s story I'm here at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter where you can explore Sir John Bowring's magnificent collection of 19th century objects from the Far East. Sir John Bowring was born in Exeter. He was a writer, industrialist, Board of Trade official, and parliamentarian who early on showed an unusual capacity for learning foreign languages, which would come in very handy amid his global travels on behalf of spreading free trade from the 1830s to the 1860s. It was in Asia, as governor of Hong Kong, that his imperial advocacy of free trade was most pronounced. And this is perhaps the most historically important document donated by Bowring. It is a copy of the so-called Bowring Treaty, a commercial treaty set up by Sir John Bowring between Great Britain and Siam, now Thailand. In 1855, Sir John left for Siam on HMS Rattler, escorted by HMS Grecian, in order to negotiate the treaty with the country's King Mongkut. It is important to consider the extent to which Siam was in a position to negotiate. Britain had recently demonstrated her military strength with victory over China in the First Opium War. Siam had also been threatened five years earlier with military force when trade negotiations failed. Indeed, it was Sir John's gunboat diplomacy that would trigger the Second Opium War in 1856 when he supported the bombardment and occupation of Canton following the seizure of a British vessel by Chinese authorities. Unusually, the document here is a Chinese copy of the treaty. It was printed using a Western-style printing press on yellow Western style paper, suggesting that Bowring himself might have had the copy made in order to demonstrate directly to the Chinese the success of his negotiations in Thailand and the hope that they might be persuaded to be more amenable to his suggestions for trade in the future. Amongst other things, the treaty permitted British subjects to trade in all the ports of Siam, legalising the duty-free import of opium, and setting up consular jurisdiction at Bangkok. © University of Exeter, 2015 Empire: The Controversies of British Imperialism .

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