Quite unreasonably some countries didn't particularity like that and tried to resist but a musket to the face soon made them a lot more compliant but it wasn't all take, sometimes we even introduced things to Johnny Foreigner such as hard drugs which is how i found myself in charge of exporting tonnes of opium into China.
I started out as a surgeon but trading drugs was far more lucrative so i took it up full time importing Opium in from India but when the Chinese Empire, our best customer, began to see the unfavorable side of massive, widespread heroin addiction, it made the choice of banning the drug and the Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 cases of opium that we had smuggled into China.
What the Chinese Commissioner failed to understand was that me and my company was making so much money that unlike their addicted citizens, we weren't going to take that laying down.
My attempts at negotiations with the Chinese were unsuccessful so i returned to London to try and persuade the Government that it was in its interests to force China to take more of our trade but the British Foreign Secretary at that time was the terminally stupid Duke of Wellington and he refused to sanction a war with China.
When i made it back to the far east, the Qing government had made greater strides in suppressing our drug trafficking and was regularly destroying the cases of opium as they arrived, we had lost 50% of our stock so when Wellington was replaced as Foreign Minister by Lord Palmerston, i tried again and good old Palmy was much more happy to slap the Chinese around and told them either they accept whatever the hell we threw at them or else the might of ther British Navy would land on their doorstep. Oh and by the way we want a convenient outpost to unload our hard core drugs for your hopelessly addicted populace, Hong Kong looks about right so throw in that and we got a deal.
China said WTF! and that's how a large fleet of British war ships appeared on the China coast laying waste to town after town with heavy cannon fire, until the Imperial Government, forced to surrender, gave in to our demands and even paid me compensation for all the opium they had destroyed.
Still, the British Empire wasn't all fun, ethnic cleansing, slavery, land theft, exploitation and forcing addiction on people, i returned to Britain and became an MP but it didn't last long as my health rapidly deteriorated due to colon cancer and i died just three days after my 59th birthday, one of the richest and most powerful men in Britain.
I was truly lucky to have been alive in the 19th Century when Britannia ruled the waves, a great time to be British or a Chinese Opium addict.
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