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The most totemic nineteenth-century military conflict between Britain and China was the First Opium War; the least memorable, perhaps, was the brief Camphor War of 1868, which broke out twenty-nine years later in Taiwan. As in the First Opium War, the Qing was defeated in the Camphor War as a result of Britain's clear technological edge over China. Yet this was more than a minor military skirmish: it was an encounter that indicates the eagerness of the Qing to reposition itself in the global arena, both politically and economically. The Camphor War reminds us that the 'clash of empires' was very much part of a process of global consumption and commercialisation, which forced the Qing court for the first time to grapple with defending its natural resources and its existing monopoly over an established market. By tracing the social and material history of camphor, we can also see how demand for this commodity set the gears of the Qing, the British and the American empires into motion. The Camphor War was not concerned with a territorial dispute or the opening of a port city; its essential interest lies in revealing how, in the post-Opium age, competition between the Qing Empire and foreign powers could revolve around access to, and control over, a truly global commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice turn in IR offers new ways to understand how diplomats can creatively engage with their environment and one another. Yet, sometimes their diplomatic practices limit their ability to achieve agreements. This article focuses on how and why domestic practices conflict with international practices, and why states sometimes might feel constrained into engaging in practices that harm their international position. Drawing on field theory, I introduce a causal mechanism I call symbolic binding that explains why regimes may become so bound by their domestic practices of legitimation that they incur considerable international cost. Symbolic binding occurs when the symbolic practices needed to generate domestic legitimacy intersect and conflict with practices from the diplomatic field, when domestic audiences are observing the diplomatic interaction, and when regimes have limited access to alternative forms of political capital. I demonstrate the logic of this mechanism by analyzing the antagonistic diplomacy that occurred between Britain and China from the late eighteenth until the late nineteenth century. I show that the root of this diplomatic conflict can be linked to the incompatibility of both states' diplomatic practices and show how the Qing regime's need to maintain domestic legitimacy constrained it into steadfastly adhering to diplomatic practices that were incompatible with that of encroaching European powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers foreign relations between China and Europe between 1845 and 1914, focusing on how European-led changes to China's infrastructure after the First Opium War impacted ancestral tombs and led to social unrest among Chinese against their colonizers. Topics include anti-foreign propaganda, ancestor worship, modernization and traditional Chinese society, the belief of the interrelationship between nature and built environment known as feng sui, and death practices.