1839China pours the British opium stocks into the sea at Humen
By the 1830s British merchants were shipping vast quantities of Indian opium into China, against the emperor’s ban, and paying for Chinese tea with the proceeds. Addiction spread and silver drained out of the country. In 1838 the Daoguang Emperor sent the respected official Lin Zexu to Canton (Guangzhou) as imperial commissioner, with full powers to end the trade. Arriving in March 1839, Lin blockaded the foreign merchants in their warehouses until they handed over their stocks, more than 20,000 chests of the drug.
On 3 June 1839 Lin’s men began destroying the opium in public on the shore at Humen, at the mouth of the Pearl River. Rather than burn it, they broke it up in trenches filled with water, salt and lime, and let the foul-smelling mixture out to sea on the ebb tide. The work took about three weeks and disposed of well over a thousand tonnes. Lin became a national hero in China, but Britain answered with warships, and the First Opium War followed.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: The Opium War Museum (Google Arts & Culture): The Burning of Opium at Humen ↗
1947Britain’s last viceroy announces the plan to divide India
Early in 1947 the British government said it would hand over power in India by June 1948, and sent Lord Louis Mountbatten to Delhi as the last viceroy to arrange it. The Indian National Congress wanted a single united India, while Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League demanded a separate homeland for Muslims, Pakistan. As violence between communities grew, Mountbatten became convinced that only partition could bring a settlement.
On 3 June 1947 he announced the plan on All India Radio: British India would become two independent dominions, India and Pakistan, and Punjab and Bengal would be divided between them. The Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh followed him on air to accept it, and the handover was brought forward to August 1947. Independence came within ten weeks, but the partition that followed uprooted millions of people and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: All India Radio ↗
1992Australia’s High Court recognises native title in the Mabo case
In 1982 five Meriam people from Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait, led by Eddie Koiki Mabo, went to court to establish that their people had always owned their island. The case struck at an old legal idea: that when Britain claimed Australia the land was terra nullius, belonging to no one, so that the Crown owned it all outright. The case dragged on for ten years, and Eddie Mabo died of cancer in January 1992, months before it was settled.
On 3 June 1992 the High Court of Australia ruled by six judges to one that the Meriam people held traditional title to their lands. The court went further, finding that native title could survive for Indigenous peoples across Australia, and that the doctrine of terra nullius had no place in the country’s law. Parliament passed the Native Title Act the following year, and 3 June is now marked as Mabo Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Archives of Australia: Eddie Koiki Mabo and the Mabo case ↗
1621The Dutch West India Company receives its charter
Twenty years after the Dutch East India Company was set up to trade with Asia, merchants in the young Dutch Republic wanted a similar company for the Atlantic. On 3 June 1621 the States General, the republic’s governing body, granted a charter to the Dutch West India Company, giving it a 24-year monopoly on Dutch trade with the Americas and West Africa. The charter ran to 45 articles and placed the company under a board of directors, the Lords Nineteen.
It was far more than a trading licence. The company could make treaties, build forts, raise soldiers, found colonies and fight Spain, then at war with the Dutch. It went on to found New Netherland, with its capital New Amsterdam on Manhattan, to seize part of Brazil for a time, to capture Elmina on the Gold Coast, and to become one of the main carriers in the Atlantic slave trade.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Library of Congress: Charter given by the States General on the date of June the third, 1621 ↗
1955France and Tunisia sign the agreements on self-rule
Tunisia had been a French protectorate since 1881. From the 1930s the Neo-Destour party of Habib Bourguiba led the campaign for independence, and by the early 1950s strikes, arrests and armed resistance had made French rule increasingly hard to sustain. In July 1954 the French prime minister, Pierre Mendes France, flew to Tunisia and promised the country internal autonomy, and negotiations began.
Bourguiba came home from exile on 1 June 1955 and rode through cheering crowds in Tunis. Two days later, on 3 June, the French and Tunisian governments signed the agreements that gave Tunisia self-rule, while France kept control of defence and foreign affairs and its Resident-General gave way to a High Commissioner. The limits did not last long: Tunisia became fully independent in March 1956.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: CVCE (University of Luxembourg): Independence for Morocco and Tunisia ↗
