The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China

Julia Lovell's "immensely readable" account has been released in an American edition. Below is a review from October 2011:

The Opium War never figured very highly in Western historical consciousness, and indeed today is all but forgotten, but it is still very much at the forefront of Chinese national and official self-awareness. Julia Lovell writes in her new history of the Sino-British conflict that