10 Wars That Were Started For Stupid Reasons
6. The Right To Sell Drugs (Great Britain Vs China, 1839-1842)
Economics is a curious science, obscure and only partially understood by the majority of people yet arguably the single biggest force influencing what we get up to every day. Economics, for instance, says that if you import things from a particular country, you need to sell that country just as much.
In the mid-18th Century, Britain just couldn't get enough of those groovy new Chinese silks and varieties of life-giving tea, but China didn't want anything the British Empire had. Britain needed to come up with an export product China really wanted.
The East India Company came up with the ideal solution - drugs. Lots and lots of sweet, sweet, spirit-crushing drugs. They sold bucketloads of deliciously moreish opium to China, got a load of Chinese people addicted to the stuff, and let the money roll in.
China wasn't too keen on this and banned the opium trade in 1838, which struck Britain as being uncommonly rude so they went to war. This whole drug dealing dispute is now called the First Opium War, because the Brits tried to do it again fourteen years later.