SAME.

14/
I still have 50+ pages to go before finishing, so future updates may be coming!

14/
Man, what was going on in that family?

Pezzullo has the answer. Can you guess it?

13/
To say one good thing for this book, I learned that James Bruce, leader of British forces during the Opium Wars and the man who actually ordered the destruction/looting of the Summer Palace, was the 8th Earl of Elgin, aka the son of the guy who stole the Parthenon marbles from Greece.

12/
Instead, Pezzullo goes for the astonishing "Certainly, there was plenty of arrogance and cultural insensitivity on both sides".

11/
Not that I mean to defend Imperial Japan's extremely abundant racism! But compare that screenshot to the section on British and French looting during the Opium Wars, during which the word 'racism' or what Victorian schools taught about Chinese people, somehow manages not to come up.

10/
This one is maybe petty to complain about, given some of the previous wild statements from this book, but Pezzullo's description of the Japanese attitude during the Nanking Massacre struck me as odd.

Yes! I love that story. I mean, maybe 'love' isn't the right word, but it so perfectly captures everything about the Opium Wars that if it was fiction I'd say the author was being over-the-top

9/

Anyway, you know how the British and other Western trading powers took over Shanghai in the early 1900s? That was also the fault of Freemasonry.

8/
And here's the rest of the page.

My thoughts: "Oh ....he's just going for straight-up racism, huh. Let me reread this page to check – nope, that's actually happening. Wow."

7/
This is the next sentence.

My thoughts: "Okay, he's going to talk about how groups pushed out of mainstream society and refused access to legal avenues of success often turn to illegal means, right, right."

6/
A chapter later, when discussing two Irish Travellers who were arrested after stealing Chinese artifacts from a museum in England in 2012, I got to this sentence.

My thoughts: "All right, he's going to talk about the role of racism in Ireland and how it affects the Traveller population."

I know, right?

5/
...yup, Freemasonry. Definitely the most likely cause of the Opium Wars.

There's so many possibal answers: capitalism? racism? the specific form of mercantilism that supported early multinational corporations like the EIC, VOC, Royal African Company? a wave of new forms of evangelical Christianity?

Readers, Pezzullo came up with an answer I had never before considered.

3/ 20 pages (only 20 pages!!) in, I hit this line. An interesting question, to be sure! What DID cause the East India Company to be so indifferent to the moral horror of deliberately addicting millions of Chinese people to opium?

2/ Sounded interesting! I teach about the Opium Wars, so I'm always interested in reading more about it.