HISTORICAL SUMMARY

Hong Kong entered the orbit of British imperial power when that power was almost at its zenith in the middle of the nineteenth century. The manner of entry was also a particularly violent, and in some ways also atypical, one. At that point in time the British Empire was expanding across the world out of the older eighteenth-century mercantile imperium, in search of new trading opportunities elsewhere. At the same time, imperial strategy was moving away from the formal annexation of new territories to the establishment of trading settlements, some of which also doubled as strategic military outposts. The older, more ruthless mercantilist approach, in which a conquered country's markets would be deployed to the advantage of the metropole, and that country then be forced to import goods from said metropole, generated inevitable hostility amongst subject populations, and, in addition, and most importantly from the point of view of the British Treasury, finally proved to be overly expensive to maintain.

By the mid-nineteenth century British imperialist officials and traders had largely moved on from this subjugation-mercantilist model to one based on adherence to the principles of ‘free trade’, and the establishment of trading settlements and arrangements based – usually quite loosely – on such principles. Now, the primary concern was to ensure that trade could take place ‘fairly’, according to the ‘laws’ of supply and demand, and unhindered by local protectionist obstructions.