Exploitation, brutality and misery: how the opium trade shaped the modern world
- Written by The Conversation
In the final pages of Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, Amitav Ghosh volunteers a startling confession. Though he had spent many years working on the book and had “accumulated an enormous amount of material”, he decided he could not go on with it, as he was overwhelmed by the “despicable meanness” of the subject matter. Accordingly, he cancelled the contracts he had signed and returned the advances to his publishers.
Beside the despair occasioned by the catalogue of exploitation, brutality and misery, Ghosh also had to reckon with an unusual narrative challenge: at the heart of his book was “a non-human protagonist, a plant”.
So, why did he change his mind and eventually return to the project?
Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories – Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)
Ghosh claims it was not a conceptual breakthrough that brought him back to the book, but the evidence of the Earth’s vitality, embodied in the potency of a single plant, the opium poppy, and broadly reflected in the effects of climate change.
In the face of climbing temperatures, rising sea levels and increasingly destructive storms, it is clear to Ghosh that humankind is headed for a painful reckoning. He contends that we have suffered through this lesson before, yet failed to profit from it.
His record of humankind’s efforts to make the opium poppy an instrument of political and economic power becomes a compelling parable of our collective failure to treat the natural world with the respect it commands and learn from painful experience that those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.
Signing of the Treaty of Bhairowal between the Sikh Empire and British East India Company – artist unknown (c.1846-7).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Long-term effects
Ghosh identifies the long term effects of the opium economy on modern India and the regional inequalities it produced and entrenched. He draws attention to the continued backwardness of the Bihar-Benares (Varanasi) corridor, where the East India Company established its first large-scale growing and production facilities, exercising a strict monopoly over cultivation, trade and export.
The company’s all-engrossing focus was on the cultivation, processing, transport and export of opium. The resulting commitment of its resources was to regimes of surveillance and enforcement, rather than welfare and community investment.
It is little surprise that, even now, these areas have had demonstrably worse long-term social and economic outcomes than neighbouring areas, with “distinctly lower levels of literacy, and fewer primary schools and healthcare facilities”.
This in contrast to the Malwa region of India’s central west, another area ideal for poppy cultivation with a long history of indigenous growth and trade in opium. The local Marathas held out against the forces of the East India Company for a longer period. They dealt the company a series of stunning military setbacks, impressing the British generals with the discipline, mobility and firepower of their artillery.
By the time the Marathas were subdued in 1803, it was too late for the company to march in and monopolise the opium trade. Though defeated, the Marathas maintained formidable armies and controlled large tracts of land that the company would struggle to bring under its control.
Further, the indigenous growers of Malwa opium had well-established syndicates and trade networks the company could neither control nor co-opt. In the face of these entrenched patterns of production and trade, the company acquiesced to the status quo, profiting instead from transit duties as the opium passed through Bombay.
But it was not only the company that reaped the benefits of the west’s indigenous opium trade. Ghosh turns back the dusty covers of long-gone ledgers and trading concessions to show that Bombay’s origins as the beating heart of modern India’s commercial dynamism – and the source of a number of the country’s industrial and financial titans, the Tata Group among them – can be traced back to opium:
Of all the beneficiaries of the Malwa opium trade, none gained more than the mercantile networks of western India […] opium was the main source of capital accumulation for indigenous merchants and bankers in western India during the first half of the nineteenth century.
It is an appealing, if somewhat disquieting paradox: the opium trade that impoverished and crippled India also financed and helped forge the modern state.
Opium smokers – William Thomas Saunders (1867).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Opium Wars
But where was all this opium going? It is in answering this question that the book‘s principal weakness comes to the fore.
To address a trade imbalance that tea exports tilted heavily in favour of China, and to feed a growing demand for opium from Chinese addicts – fed by smuggled product to date – Britain hypocritically insisted on its right to import opium to the middle kingdom.
China’s Qing dynasty rulers were implacably opposed to this demand, having outlawed the opium trade and done their utmost to eradicate its use. But they were powerless to resist the better-armed British and their all-conquering navy.
Despite some dogged defence, and the odd success on the battlefield, the Chinese were comprehensively defeated in the Opium Wars of 1838-1842 and 1856-1860. Canton (Guangzhou), Nanking (Nanjing) and Peking (Beijing), among other of its major cities, were bombarded, captured and sacked.
The subsequent treaties imposed humiliating trade and territorial concessions on China – not least a fivefold increase in treaty ports where Britons could trade and reside, extra-territoriality for British subjects, and the ceding of Hong Kong. The defeat compelled China to swallow the river of opium that flowed in through its now open ports.
When modern China’s Wolf Warriors talk about avenging past humiliations and recovering the nation’s lost face, the Opium Wars are the fuel that fires their aggressive neo-nationalism: exhibit A in their arraignment of western arrogance.
East India Company ships destroying Chinese war junks during the first Opium War – Edward Duncan (1843).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The damage done
It wasn’t only the British who profited from the opium trade. The Royal Dutch Trading Company’s opium monopoly in the Dutch East Indies – modern day Indonesia – returned astronomical profits that financed a range of national enterprises. Among them is one of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers, Royal Dutch Shell.
The Americans also profited mightily from the subordination of 19th century China. A small group of traders from established East Coast families, and a few well-connected interlopers, made fortunes from the opium trade.
This capital, and the men who made it, helped build America’s railroads. It financed the great hotel chains that linked its major cities. ‘It supplied the plant for the engineering and textile factories that drove its manufacturing boom. Through opium, writes Ghosh, “America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution.”
Yet the drug that helped build America almost broke it. The book is at its best when Ghosh is roused to righteous fury. Interestingly, neither the suffering of the poor poppy farmers of Bihar, nor that of the hapless addicts of China exercise him nearly as much as the damage inflicted on the United States public by the Sackler family.
Ghosh reserves his deepest indignation for Purdue Pharma and its most profitable product, Oxycodone. Tracing the development of the prescription painkiller back to the 1970s, when prohibitions on opiate-based medications were first relaxed, Ghosh again reverts to cold data to drive home the damage Purdue’s principal brand, OxyContin, wreaked across America.
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At the height of the opioid epidemic in the US, overdoses became the country’s leading cause of death.
Toby Talbot/AAP
A little more than 20 years after the drug first entered the market in 1996, 30 million Americans, around 3% of the population, were believed to be addicts. Over this period, opioid overdose became the country’s leading cause of death, killing more people than guns or cars:
in 2016 an average of 175 Americans were dying of overdoses every day, adding up to an annual total of 64,000, equal to the entire population of cities the size of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The epidemic ended up claiming more American lives than all US military deaths in World War II.
How could this happen in a modern, developed state with the full panoply of regulatory authorities in place to prevent just such a tragedy? In a fatal echo of the British, US and European traders’ efforts to corrupt and undermine government authority in 19th century China, the rising tide of addiction in America was accompanied by the corporate capture of state structures and the steady erosion of public trust in figures and institutions that had once commanded respect.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted only cursory, two-week trials on OxyContin before approving it. Two of the examiners overseeing the approval process later went to work for Purdue Pharma. When the FDA convened a panel to examine the harm being done by the drug, eight members of the ten-person panel had ties to pharmaceutical companies.
The epidemic unfolded against a broader range of institutional failures, laid bare by the global financial crisis of 2008. Opioid use surged in its wake. Governments bailed out the banks, the architects of the crisis walked away scot free, and ordinary Americans were left to pick up the tab. Mining, manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs disappeared in the resulting economic downturn. Faith in the country’s institutions reached an all-time low, with catastrophic effects during the COVID-19 pandemic and, before that, at the ballot box.
Enter stage right, Donald John Trump. While the prospect of Trump’s return to office at this year’s US presidential election may bring on a headache, think twice before you pop a pill to escape the “despicable meanness” of what that might bring. The opioid that takes your pain away may have helped put him in the White House in the first place.