The Curious Colonialist Subplot of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

I found Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland to be an enjoyable film, but a bit underwhelming. There was nothing wondrous about "Underland", as it's known in the film, and no spectacular visuals you might expect from a dream world.

...but one thing that upset me was the ahistorical idea that Alice's little multinational would be "the first to trade with China". The first what to trade with China? Not the first European to trade with China, the Portuguese arrived in Macau in 1535. The British East India Company established a post in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1711.

In 1865, when Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), it was five years past since Britain's victory in the Second Opium War and one year after the end of the Taiping Rebellion and in the middle of the Dungan revolt, a rebellion of the Hui, Uighers, and other Muslim minority groups in China (the Taiping Rebellion was actually lead by a Christian convert, Hóng Xiùquán 洪秀全, who proclaimed himself the brother of Christ).

The Opium Wars were largely result of the efforts of the British East India Company trying to correct its trade imbalance through getting the Chinese addicted to opium from India. Like today, this MNC had a huge deficit with China, there was a high demand for Chinese goods, silks, porcelain, and tea. The "Canton System" limited Foreign Direct Investment to Canton (Guangzhou) and foreign companies established thirteen factories, essentially a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ). Chinese government policy only accepted silver bullion as payment, a serious macroeconomic problem in the long run. It's interesting to note that the first modern FTZ in China was created in Shenzhen, in between Hong Kong & Guangzhou, in 1980 as one of Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 first and most successful economic reforms.

After 1757 the East India Company directly controlled Bengal and an ever-increasing amount of the sub-continent. By 1773, the company's costs of administering its own country and its deficit with China nearly drove it bankrupt. Parliament passed the East India Company Act 1773, bailing-out and partially nationalizing the company. Parliament also expanded its powers of monopoly and passed the Tea Act, allowing it to import directly to the American Colonies and indirectly sparking the American Revolution, as I have written about here. It still had to contend with its huge silver payments to China in order to sustain the increasing demand for Chinese goods. The sale and smoking of opium in China was banned since 1729 and reaffirmed in 1799. The company started to sell opium from India to be smuggled and sold into China. By 1773, opium exports from India was at 75 tons, up from 15 tons in 1730. The Opium trade with China became very strong and the East India Company had a British government-supported monopoly on the product, in 1820 900 tons of Bengali Opium was illegally imported to China.

In 1833, Earl Grey's Parliament (yes, the tea-loving Earl Grey) Abolished Slavery, it restricted child labor, re-conquered the Faukland Islands, and it abolished the East India Company's monopoly, reasserted the government's control of the board, and forbade employment discrimination of race, religion, and heritage in the company, although the territories of the East India Company as well as Sri Lanka (Ceylon) were explicitly exempt from abolishing slavery. Britain also sent a representative to China to see if it couldn't lobby the government to liberalize the restrictive Canton System which even forbade Westerners from learning Chinese. The government mandarins would not see the envoy or read his letter, contact was also forbidden.

There's a statue of Lin Ze Xu 林則徐, the world's first Drug Czar, that's near the Manhattan bridge and I passed it often when I used to take the Chinatown Bus from Philadelphia. In 1839, before the first Opium War, he wrote this open letter to Queen Victoria:

We find that your country is twenty-four or twenty-eight thousand miles from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience?

When Lin Ze Xu demanded that the British forfeit their opium, the British refused and the Chinese imposed an embargo. The British Superintendent of Trade relented and promised to compensate for all confiscated opium. The British treasury didn't want to pay for that and some people back in London and Calcutta were pretty furious that British property was being confiscated, so they went to war instead and sent the British Indian Army. And that's how the British got Hong Kong... which is referenced in the movie as "a new stronghold in Hong Kong" or some rubbish like that.

And then there was another Opium War in 1856 and a big mutiny leading to war in India in 1857 triggered by the introduction of a new rifle which resulted in the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj. All of this happened BEFORE Alice in Wonderland was published, and therefore presumably before the film takes place.

I did a search to see if anyone else who has written about this ahistorical subplot and found these words by Frederica Mathewes-Green in Christianity Today:

At the movie's end, Alice re-emerges at the garden party, refuses the young man's hand, and then speaks to his father—one of her dad's partners of old, it turns out, and now owner of the company. She talks of the thrill of international trading, and stresses particularly the opportunity to be the first to initiate trade with China. The lord is impressed, and invites her to be his apprentice. In the final sequence we see Alice standing nobly on the deck of a ship, heading out to the open sea.

This is wrong on so many counts it's hard to know where to start. It's a dud, dramatically, to go from multicolored Wonderland to the world of business planning. It's hard to picture capitalism as the ideal calling for the girl who fell down a rabbit hole. And were those 19th century international corporations really so admirable? In the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Depp's character fights against exactly the same type of business that Alice champions here.

And did it have to be China? Won't some history-savvy viewers wonder how many years Alice can profit from that nation, before its citizens rise up against foreigners in the Boxer Rebellion? "Let's be first to trade in China" is a bit like "Let's be first to invest in the Hindenburg."

Eileen Jones at The Exile writes:

The frame story of the film is pretty bad—best to ignore it as much as possible. It’s standard girl-power boilerplate projected back onto the Victorian Era, courtesy of screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who’s already cursed us with Disney crap like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. In her vision, Alice is a frowny teen who refuses to wear a corset or marry a total git, and opts for a career instead. Problem is, her chosen career is colonial-era exploitation—at the end she’s going to go expand trade routes to China and parts East, standing tall at the prow of an English ship, and we know how that kind of thing turned out.

And Todd McCarthy writes in Variety:

A jaw-dropping coda pivots on a "visionary" character's forthcoming voyage to open up trade with China, provoking musings about Disney's rationale for this sort of corporate encomium to a vast young market, as well as thoughts of a never-to-be-made sequel set among 19th-century Chinese as inscrutable and combative as the population of Underland.

ABC announced it was buying the rights to syndicate Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The actual original book should be in the public domain right now, could NBC release a series based on the source material? Will it contain this subplot? 19th-century international trade and capitalism are fascinating topics but also fairly dangerous to cover. I don't think objectivity is an obtainable goal, tell it from whatever perspective you want; accuracy, however, is.

I'm sure the screenwriter thought, "ooo, trade with China has become extremely important in the United States in the past two decades, let's try to connect the history with yesterday with current trends." This is done in every period film, it's a habit most screenwriters can't avoid. But now millions of people who don't know any better are being lead to believe that British trade with China happened sometime in the later-half of the 19th century, after the British obtained their "stronghold in Hong Kong". It's not the tail that wags the dog.

coffee and tea

The coffee that is available here is primarily Turkish Coffee and the horrible abomination known as Nescafe--instant "coffee". This was the same when I was in Turkey, which was even more appalling considering the Ottoman Empire introduced coffee to the western world--they weren't able to to conquer Vienna with armies but they conquered it with coffee and cafés and from there coffee culture spread westward and northward (read this story of the first Viennese coffee shop). For Turks to drink instant coffee made by a swiss conglomerate (Nestlé S.A.) is a very bizarre thing, in my opinion.



Americans colonists drank tea like their fellow British citizens and then the British government started changing colonial industrial policy regarding tea, including the Tea Act. This expanded the monopoly power of the British East India Company--the Nestlé of the 18th century--the giant corporation that by the late 1700s directly controlled all of Bengal and nearly the entire eastern coast of India. The act allowed the British East India Company to directly import tea from India to the American Colonies, previously it was smuggled. Americans would be able to get higher quality and legal tea direct from India, but they also would have had to pay the Tea Tax, the only part of the hated Townshend Act that was not repealed by parliament. A bunch of smugglers and other angry colonists were upset in this change in Industrial Policy and threw a bunch of tea in Boston Harbor in 1773. Parliament responded with reprisals (Intolerable Acts) and tensions built until war broke out in 1775. Coffee drinking became a patriotic duty.

There's a Thomas Jefferson quote saying that, it's really quite remarkable that the American Revolution became set in motion all over a three-penny tax on tea. I can't find it, every few months ago I try to search for it. I did, however, find a quote from Frederick Douglas 1852 speech, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro", "You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country." ...not quite the quote I was looking for, but a very interesting speech from 10 years before the Emancipation Proclamation none the less. It would be interesting to know how many opinion-leaders of the current Tea Party movement know the history regarding tea in America.

I also ran across this while I was writing this post: "The Women's Petition Against Coffee". It's from England in 1674 and it's a hilarious satire lamenting that men are spending too much time drinking coffee and ignoring husbandly duties:

Since 'tis Reckon'd amongst the Glories of our Native Country, To be a Paradise for Women: The fame in our Apprehensions can consist in nothing more than the brisk Activity of our men, who in former Ages were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome; But to our unspeakable Grief, we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigor; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us...

The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a furious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE...

At these [Coffee] Houses (as at the Springs in Afric) meet all sorts of Animals, whence follows the production of a thousand Monster Opinions and Absurdities; yet for being dangerous to Government, we dare to be their Compurgators, as well knowing them to be too tame and too talkative to make any desperate Politicians: For though they may now and then destroy a Fleet, or kill ten thousand of the French, more than all the Confederates can do, yet this is still in their politick Capacities, for by their personal valour they are scarce fit to be of the Life-guard to a Cherry-tree: and therefore, though they frequently have hot Contests about most Important Subjects; as what colour the Red Sea is of; whether the Great Turk be a Lutheran or a Calvinist (the Great Turk was a name for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who was a Sunni Muslim -TSD); who Cain's Father in Law was (Cain was the son of Adam & Eve in the Bible -TSD), &c., yet they never fight about them with any other save our Weapon, the Tongue.

Some of our Sots pretend tippling of this boiled Soot cures them of being Drunk... THe Coffee-house being in truth, only a Pimp to the Tavern, a relishing foop prearative to a fresh debauch: For when people have swill'd themselves with a morning draught of more Ale than a Brewer's horse can carry, hither they come for a pennyworth of Settle-brain... once more they troop to the Sack-shop till they are drunker than before; and then by a retrograde motion, stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee; Thus like Tennis Balls between two Rackets, the Fopps our Husbands are bandied to and fro all day between the Coffee-house and Tavern, whilst we poor Souls sit mopeing all alone till Twelve at night, and when at last they come to bed smoakt like a Westphalia Hogs-head we have no more comfort of them, than from a shotten Herring or a dryed Bulrush...

Wherefore the Premises considered, and to the end that our Just Rights may be restored, and all the Antient Priviledges of our Sex preserved inviolable; That our Husbands may give us some other Testimonies of their being Men, besides their Beards and wearing of empty Pantaloons: That they no more run the hazard of being Cuckol'd by Dildo's: But returning to the good old strengthning Liquors of our Forefathers; that Natures Exchequer may once again be replenisht, and a Race of Lusty Hero's begot, able by their Atchievments, to equal the Glories of our Ancesters.

We Humbly Pray, That you our Trusty Patrons would improve your Interest, that henceferth the Drinking COFFEE may on severe penalties be forbidden to all Persons under the Age of Threescore (60 years old -TSD); and that instead thereof, Lusty nappy Beer, Cock-Ale, Cordial Canaries, Restoring Malago's, and Back-recruiting Chocholet be Recommended to General Use, throughout the Utopian Territories.

Here's the mens answer to the womens petition against coffee, vindicating their own Performances, and the Vertues of that Liquor, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon them by their Scandalous Pamphlet.

So there you have it, coffee. Now I'll write the post I intended to write...