Opium Wars
Publication of "The Opium Wars" (2002) in China was unusual because Chinese scholars and government watchdogs typically rejected Western accounts of their history as biased and Eurocentric. The book attempted to offer a more balanced account of the two conflicts fought between Britain and China in the mid-19th century. In his critique of "The Opium Wars" in the " East Asian Review of Books", Wayne E. Yang wrote: "Those who believe the dictum that 'those who fail to learn [from] history are doomed to repeat it' have fodder in W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello's "The Opium Wars"." In a review for the American Library Association's "Booklist", Jay Freeman wrote: "[This] account of the causes, military campaigns, and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre, and deeply unsettling." "Publishers Weekly" wrote, "Hanes ("Imperial Diplomacy in the Era of Decolonization") and film author and former "Los Angeles Daily News" critic Sanello have teamed up to produce this fine popular account... The book covers a familiar time and place in history, but the authors make some nice analogies between the brutal economics and empire of the 19th century, and 21st-century forms of money, politics and war."