一九世紀中葉、華南沿海秩序の再編--イギリス海軍と閩粤海盜 (特集 アジア東方海域の近世)

Abstract

Although the piracy that had broken out during the Opium War threatened trade at treaty ports after the war, there has been a lack of interest in this piracy and few studies of the issue have been conducted. The problems of these previous studies are that they have been unable to situate this piracy historically is due factors such as the disjunction between Ming and Qing history and modern Chinese history, that studies of the British Navy have been uniformly biased toward a diplomatic approach, and that limited number of historical sources have been used. This study aims to fill this major lacuna in the field and also place the piracy of the mid nineteenth century in the context of the long-term history of maritime regions. The study deals with southern part of Fujian and employs both written records in English from the British Foreign Office and Admiralty and records in Chinese as well. The concentration of trade into the treaty ports after their opening struck a blow to those who were engaged in the opium trade in coastal regions and invited a great increase in piracy. Increases in acts of piracy in turn invited the intervention of the British Navy, and it began operations to crackdown on piracy using the treaty ports as bases of operations. As a result it became impossible to conduct piracy on a large scale, and pirate bands were suppressed by the end of the decade of the 1840s. Amidst the deployment of the British Navy, the pirates of Fujian lost the power that they had amassed since the Song Dynasty as a result of the anti-piracy operations of the British Navy, the spread of Cantonese power, and the defeat in the revolt of Small Sword Society 小刀會, etc. On the other hand, Cantonese pirates increased their power along the entire coast due to their relations with Westerners, their use of secure bases, their participation in the Qing navy, and the cooperation of Cantonese merchants. This new power reached its peak by the middle of the 1850s. In contrast the British Navy, using the treaty ports that were established with cooperation of local bureaucrats as bases, as in Amoy, suppressed the Cantonese pirates, insured the safety of Western trading vessels that plied the treaty ports, and promoted the concentration of previously dispersed trade into the treaty ports. This was then expanded to other treaty ports. As a result, by using the British Navy, the Qing Government was able to subdue Fujian pirates, and later suppress Cantonese pirates and achieve a revival of order in coastal areas. It appears that by using the British Navy, the Qing Government was able to firmly revive coastal order and incur a financial burden smaller than that which would have been required to co-opt Chinese pirates on its own.