Abstract: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the opium trade between British India and China brought tremendous disasters to Chinese economy and society, while earning British government and businessmen huge profits.In 1907, However, British government proposed,and two countries agreed, to reduce and eventually terminate opium exports to China. This article examines the changes in the economic,political and social structures of Britain,India and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The author finds that the structural changes in British domestic industry led to similar changes in foreign trade.The aim of British industrial capitalists to expand their exports to China was the fundamental reason that British government curtailed opium exports to China．