Freshly bathed, Kamala set about preparing her family’s evening meal. First she smoothed fresh cow dung in a circle to define a purified cooking space and sprinkled it with a few drops of water. Then she took some of the chillies she had plucked from the plants that grew near the family’s hut and cast them on the grinding stone with a few drops of safflower oil, made from the seeds of the thistle-like plants that formed a picturesque hedge surrounding their plot of land. She crushed the chillies to a fine paste and added them, with salt, to flour made from finely ground parched maize. When she stepped outside the area of the hearth to fetch water, she was careful to wash her hands and feet again before returning to her cooking.1 She poured a little of the water into the cornflour and kneaded it vigorously to make an unboiled pudding known as chhattu.2
Meanwhile, Kamala’s daughter prepared a chutney by grinding together a few black peppercorns, some salt and a little ginger with a handful of Bengali currants, small red-black berries foraged from Carissa carandas bushes that grew wild in the fields around the village.3 When the food was ready, the women called the men to come and eat. They broke off from their work of strewing the fertilising ashes from the fireplace around the poppies. They too washed their hands and feet, then cast a small amount of food into the fire. Together with her daughter, Kamala served her husband first, and then their two sons, the elder followed by the younger. The women would eat later, once the men had had their fill.4 They were all hungry, having eaten only a handful of parched maize at midday. The meal that they savoured at the end of their long working day bore an uncanny resemblance to the cornmeal mush and sorrel stew eaten by African slaves on a Carolina rice plantation. The starchy component of their meal was another version of the porridge that was the staple food of slaves in the Americas. The sauce they dipped it in was distinctively Indian, but they ate it in a similar fashion to the Africans, using their right hands to tear off a piece of chhattu, which they rolled into a neat ball and dipped into the chutney.
BENGALI CURRANT CHUTNEY
Cut the currants in half and deseed. Grind them with a teaspoon of salt, some red chillies, a teaspoon of cumin seeds and a handful of fresh coriander leaves. Add water if the mixture is too thick. When ground, add the freshly squeezed juice of one lemon and mix well.
Gooseberries or cranberries can be substituted for the Bengali currants.
Kamala and her family lived near Patna in the province of Bihar. In 1811, when she and her family sat down to their meal, the province had been under East India Company rule for nearly forty years. During the eighteenth century, the Company had become embroiled in territorial disputes with Indian rulers, and in 1765 their army had defeated the combined forces of the Mughal emperor and the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Buxar. As a result of their victory, they were able to force the emperor to grant the Company itself – rather than an Indian noble – the governorship of the province. This had transformed a trading enterprise into an autonomous ruling power in control of one of the largest private armies in the world.5
The British idea of themselves as the new Romans bringing civilisation to barbarians gained fresh vigour with their acquisition of Indian territory. Company merchants were converted into administrators, dispensing justice and supervising the collection of the tax revenue of one of India’s wealthiest regions. The British politician Edmund Burke believed that private ownership of land was the foundation of a stable society, and he argued that it was incumbent on the British to introduce this first principle of civilisation to India. Consequently, in 1793 the Company imposed what became known as the Permanent Settlement on Bengal. Under its terms, ownership of the land was transferred to the tax-collecting nobility, or zamindaris, who were thus transformed into a version of Britain’s landed aristocracy. But rather than creating a body of English-style improving landlords, the Company brought into being a rapacious rentier class whose aim was to extract as much revenue from their tenants as possible.6
To the satisfaction of the East India Company, the peasantry raised the money to pay their taxes by growing cash crops such as indigo and cotton. The military and administrative costs of ruling Indian territory absorbed an alarmingly large proportion of the Bengal revenue, and these export crops helped to keep the Company afloat financially.7 The cash crop of most value to the Company was opium.
Kamala and her family belonged to a small sub-caste of market gardeners who specialised in the cultivation of opium poppies. Although Bihar was famed for its high-quality rice, it was only eaten by the wealthy: the cultivators of the land themselves lived on coarse grains. Traditionally, poppy farmers grew finger millet because the timetable for planting and harvesting it harmonised with raising the winter crop of poppies: they planted it in the spring and it could be harvested in August and September, leaving time to prepare the fields for the sowing of poppy seeds. Sometimes the millet was boiled in imitation of rice, but more often than not the peasants roasted it, ground it into a flour and used it to make chhattu.8
The chhattu that Kamala prepared for her family was unusual, however, because it was made with maize rather than millet flour. In the early nineteenth century, maize had begun to infiltrate the Indian subcontinent and was particularly taken up by poppy-growers: like farmers in West Africa, they found it could be grown in the same short summer season but its yields were much higher. Francis Buchanan, an Englishman who in the early nineteenth century spent seven years surveying the provinces of Bengal and Bihar, observed that around Patna, in the areas closest to the Ganges, millet was being replaced by maize.9 He was pleased to note that in these areas ‘the people have entirely lost the prejudice of considering [maize] unwholesome’ and used it to prepare both roti (flat breads) and chhattu.10
The importance of maize in the food world of the British Empire is easily overlooked because it never made any inroads into the British diet. American maize was, however, a key staple foodstuff underpinning an array of imperial commercial activities. As we have seen, the Atlantic slave trade relied on maize and manioc to supply the slave traders and their ships with food, and they formed the basis of the slaves’ diet as they laboured on the American sugar, tobacco and rice plantations. When late-nineteenth-century surveyors followed in Buchanan’s footsteps, they found that maize had completely replaced millet as the summer crop of Bihar’s poppy cultivators.11 Thus it played an important role in sustaining the opium trade, one of the Empire’s most lucrative commercial endeavours.
As a result of the preference among the labouring classes for liberally sweetened tea, the value of East India Company imports of the herb increased one hundredfold between 1700 and 1774 and tea now overtook textiles as the Company’s most valuable trading commodity.12 The loss of the American colonies in 1783 made the British government all the more determined to raise revenue from its remaining colonies.13 In 1784, in an attempt to boost the China trade, while at the same time pulling the rug from under the feet of tea smugglers, Parliament slashed the tax on tea imports, bringing the price of the lowest-quality bohea dust down from 12s. to 2s. a pound. Tea imports more than doubled within a year, and by the 1830s had doubled again to 30 million lb per annum. Tea was by now a truly mass consumer item and the Exchequer reaped the rewards: tea duties in the 1830s amounted to over £3 million and accounted for one tenth of the government’s income.14
The Company welcomed the increase in demand for imports from China, but this also intensified the problem that the Chinese showed little interest in buying the goods the Company had to offer in exchange for tea. They bought some English woollens and Indian cotton, and an array of exotic goods such as sandalwood, bêche-de-mer, bird’s nests, sharks’ fins and coral moss. These the East India Company acquired in South East Asia in exchange for Indian textiles. But the supply of sandalwood and marine animals was not sufficiently large to pay for 15 shiploads of tea per year, and the Company found itself covering about half the cost with hard currency from its Bengal revenues.15 This was unsatisfactory as it was considered very poor economics to allow Bengali silver to drain into China. And so the Company had begun casting about in search of a commodity that would unlock the Chinese market.
East India Company merchants were aware that there was a steady demand for Bengal opium among the Chinese living in Indonesian and Malay ports.16 Since European traders had introduced tobacco to China in the late sixteenth century, smoking and drinking tea had become such complementary activities for the Chinese that they found it hard to imagine engaging in one without the other and referred to the practice as yancha (smoke and tea). Early in the eighteenth century, tea-house owners had introduced a new, expensive blend of tobacco cut with opium, and by the end of the century the wealthy had dispensed with the tobacco altogether. In China, smoking pure opium became a mark of elite social status. Just as British gentlewomen used Chinese tea paraphernalia to display their wealth and sophistication, Chinese gentlemen demonstrated their affluence and good taste with the elaborate equipment associated with opium inhalation – inlaid wooden boxes, intricate lamps, decorated spoons and pipes.17 Opium devotees showed a marked preference for the mild Patna opium from eastern India over the more fiery and potentially irritating Malwa opium grown in the west. The East India Company realised that the Indian district over which they now ruled produced a commodity for which there was a potentially vast Chinese market. In 1773, they took over the production and sale of opium in Bengal.
Each September, peasants were issued licences to cultivate poppies. The Company granted them to the skilled market gardeners from the Kachhi and Koiri sub-castes who lived around Patna and Benares and who eventually made up a hereditary pool of poppy producers.18 At least 1.3 million peasants opted to grow poppies each year. There were some advantages to holding a poppy-growing licence. The Company advanced loans to farmers to cover the costs of rent, seed and fertiliser; on occasion, it also loaned money for agricultural improvements such as digging wells.19 These interest-free cash advances were appealing to the peasants because they were made at the time of year when they needed ready cash to pay their rent and allowed them to avoid the usurious rates of interest offered on loans by the village moneylender.20 Altogether the credit extended to opium cultivators injected 5–6 million rupees a year into local economies.21
Poppies were a temperamental crop and the harvesting of the opium was labour-intensive: small incisions had to be made in the thousands of seed heads every two or three days over a period of three to four weeks. It was back-breaking work to scrape the latex oozing from the incisions into a shallow brass bowl. The work involved the farmer’s entire family, and in this way the East India Company co-opted a large body of hidden and unpaid labour.22 Cultivators received a fixed sum of five rupees per seer (about 5 oz) of raw opium. In theory, the fixed price cushioned them from fluctuations in the wider market. However, when the poppies failed to yield sufficient latex to cover the costs, it was the farmer and his family who were forced to carry the loss. And when the cultivator enjoyed a bumper crop, his profit was limited. If the market price of opium rose, the Company creamed off the profits.23 By increasing the numbers of peasants who relied on cash incomes, opium production contributed to the growth of a large section in Bengali society who were vulnerable to famine when food prices spiralled in times of scarcity. However, given that only a tiny proportion of cultivated land was planted with poppies, opium production in itself was not to blame for the food scarcity that was to afflict the subcontinent with ever-increasing regularity.24
In the spring, the Company’s Assistant Sub-Deputy would tour the villages, supervising the various headmen as they weighed and graded the cakes of crude opium. It was packed into large earthenware jars, loaded onto carts and transported under armed guard to one of two Company processing factories at Bankipur and Ghazipur. Here it was refined, shaped into balls, covered with a protective wrapper of steamed poppy petals and packed into 140 lb chests.25 These were then transported to Calcutta, where they were sold at auction to private shipping companies. This was where the Company’s official involvement with the opium trade ended.
The Company delegated the illegal section of the trade to private merchants. In theory, imports of opium into China were banned. However, lying at anchor just off the southern Chinese coast were a number of heavily armed broken-down East Indiamen. The merchants used these as floating opium warehouses. The ships from Calcutta would unload their chests of opium onto the receiving ships, and at night Chinese smugglers would row out to them in their longboats with many oars, known as ‘scrambling dragons’. Drawing alongside, they would place a bag of silver in one side of a scale and the merchants would balance it with opium. ‘The price’, the captain of an American opium brig explained, ‘being weight for weight.’26 The longboats then made their way up the Pearl River past Canton, running the gauntlet of the numerous checkpoints and patrols that were supposed to make it impossible for European goods to enter China without the permission of the Chinese authorities. But the customs officers and soldiers manning the patrols were in the pay of the smugglers and turned a blind eye to their comings and goings.27
Before receiving a Company licence to trade with China, the private merchants signed bonds obliging them to pay the proceeds of their trade into the Company’s Canton treasury. In return for their bags of silver, the merchants were issued with credit bills of exchange. These could be cashed in with the Company in Bengal or with the Company’s Court of Directors in London.28 The exchange rates between the Spanish dollar – in which the Canton receipts were registered – and the pound sterling – which the bearer of the bill was paid in London – were usually generous. In this way, profits from goods bought in India and sold in China were transferred back to Britain. A similar mechanism was put in place for the Indian cotton loaded at Bombay and sold at Canton.29 Meanwhile, the Company’s agents used the silver the Canton treasury acquired in this manner to pay the Chinese for chests of tea. These were sold in London at quarterly auctions and the proceeds were used to pay those bills of exchange the merchants chose to cash in London.
In India, the circle of trade was maintained by the large funds the opium auctions raised. The Company paid the poppy cultivators the bare minimum, while they auctioned the chests of opium in Calcutta for sums far exceeding the production costs. In 1881, a chest of opium that had cost the Company 370 rupees to produce was auctioned for 1,362 rupees.30 The profits allowed the Company to pay with ease the credit bills of the private opium merchants who cashed their bills of exchange in Calcutta. The auctions also provided the funds for the next round of advance loans to the peasants, who then planted a new crop of poppies and began the cycle again.31
In the 1790s, about 4,000 chests of opium were sold by auction in Calcutta; by the 1830s, the number had risen to about 15,000. By then, the silver the private traders received from the Chinese smugglers and then in turn paid into the Canton treasury financed nearly 80 per cent of the Company’s China trade.32 The exchange of opium for Chinese silver, some of which was then paid back to the Chinese for tea, silk and porcelain, solved the Company’s problem of the balance of trade with China. At the same time it created a lucrative source of income for the Bengal government. From the late eighteenth century until the end of British rule in India in 1947, opium revenues were the third most important source of income for the Indian government after land revenue and the salt tax.33 In the 1880s, about two million peasants working less than 2 per cent of the cultivated land in the Gangetic valley generated 93.5 million rupees for the Company.34
Only a small proportion of the opium revenue was reinvested in the Bengali economy. The Company opium agencies employed a range of local administrators and collectors, whose salaries amounted to a quarter of a million rupees.35 The poppy cultivators themselves supplemented their incomes by selling various by-products of opium production. The women gathered the petals from the flowers, steamed them and sold the soft thin discs to the Company opium-processing factories, where they were used to wrap around the balls of refined opium. The surplus seeds were sold as a spice or pressed to obtain cooking oil. The residue was formed into cakes – ‘remarkably sweet and nutritious [and] wholesome food often resorted to by the poor, and greedily eaten by cattle’.36 Indeed, no part of the poppy was wasted. At the turn of the year, when the seedlings were thinned, the peasants used the leaves of the discarded plants as greens in their dhal, and the stalks could be added to the messy thatch on their huts. If they had any surplus summer maize, this was turned into an additional cash crop and sold to the wealthy in the nearby towns, who liked to eat roast corn on the cob. Most lucrative of all, even though it was illegal, the peasants would retain some of their raw opium to sell to itinerant salesmen.37
Although the system of opium production was exploitative, the small community of market gardeners around Benares and Patna appear to have been able to use poppy cultivation to lift themselves out of poverty.38 When H. H. Risley conducted an ethnographic survey a century after Francis Buchanan, he observed ‘a high rate of saving’ among poppy cultivators and noted that some had even been able to purchase their own land and lift themselves into the class of revenue-paying proprietors.39 Nevertheless, rather than being reinvested in India, by far the greater proportion of the money generated by their labour was remitted back to Britain. By means of the China trade, opium production allowed the Company and its agents to siphon off India’s wealth.40
The opium trade tends to attract almost as much moral opprobrium as the Atlantic slave trade. The Chinese state is presented as having been ‘powerless against the pernicious forces of an imperialist drug cartel’.41 The evil of opium is supposed to have drained silver out of the economy while turning the Chinese into ‘a nation of hopeless addicts, smoking themselves to death while their country descended into chaos’.42 However, a number of European and Chinese scholars have argued that by repeatedly retelling the story of the opium trade in these terms, we have fallen victim to an ‘opium myth’. They argue that opium’s reputation as a demon drug is hyperbole, and that China’s early-nineteenth-century financial crisis had as much to do with internal economic difficulties as it did with silver payments for opium.
In the 1820s, the East India Company accepted that they were unable to prevent the production and sale of opium in the independent princely states in western India. Instead, they opted to incorporate this Malwa opium into their revenue-generating system by charging pass fees on opium exported via Bombay. Malwa opium was half the price of the higher-quality Bengal product, which meant that the drug was now within the financial reach of the labouring poor, thus expanding the Chinese market. By 1835, European and Indian traders were supplying China with enough opium to provide two million people with a daily smoke.43 For Chinese labourers, a pipe of opium was the equivalent of the British workman’s cup of sweetened tea. Travelling up the Yangtze River in the 1890s, Isabella Bird observed that after a hard day’s scrambling over rocks and negotiating narrow paths in order to haul her boat upstream through the rapids, the boatmen would huddle in blankets and share a pipe of opium.44
Opium was at times abused and it was addictive but its inhalation was probably one of the least physically damaging ways of taking any of the recreational drugs available at the time. The worst health side-effect was constipation, and the vast majority of opium smokers – like most compulsive inhalers of tobacco and tipplers of gin or rum – were able to function as useful members of their society despite their foible. The idea that China was incapacitated by a hopelessly drug-addicted population was absurd propaganda. A British consul based in Hainan was surprised to find that ‘although nearly everyone uses [opium] … one never meets the opium-skeleton so vividly depicted in philanthropic works, rather the reverse – a hardy peasantry, healthy and energetic’.45
Opium was as commonly used in Britain as it was in China, with the difference that the British consumed it. Dissolved into alcohol to make laudanum, it was a common remedy for everything from stomach ache to infant colic.
TO MAKE THE BEST LIQUID LAUDANUM
Take a Quart of Sack, and half a Pint of Spirit of Wine, and four Ounces of Opium, two Ounces of Saffron; slice the Opium and pull the Saffron, and put it in a Bottle with the Sack, and Spirit of Wine, and one Ounce of Salt of Tartar, and of Cinamoa, Cloves, and Mace of each a Drachm, cork and tie down the Bottle, and set it in the Sun or by the Fire twenty Days, pour it off the Dregs, and ’tis fine to use; ten, fifteen, twenty, or twenty five Drops.46
Why then did the Chinese government demonise the opium habit and take precipitate measures against foreign merchants in order to suppress the trade? Ch’ing officials blamed the opium trade for the silver famine the Chinese economy was experiencing.47 By 1835, the Chinese desire for opium outweighed the British thirst for tea and the Chinese worried that every year purchases of opium were draining $18 million worth of silver out of their economy. Company and Indian merchant ships returning to London, Calcutta and Bombay did stash silver bullion in their holds as well as crates of tea, but the Chinese seem to have been unaware that about three quarters of the silver paid for opium was channelled straight back to them in payment for tea and silk.48 The causes of China’s silver famine were, in fact, far more complex.
In 1827, the depletion of Spain’s American silver mines triggered a worldwide depression and the quantity of silver entering the global market declined. The flow of silver into the Chinese economy from the other foreign merchants trading in Canton was therefore diminished.49 At the same time, declining production in the Yunnan copper mines led to the debasement of the copper and bronze coins that were China’s real currency. The inflation affecting copper hit ordinary peasants hard: although they paid their taxes in copper, the amount they had to pay was calculated in silver. They were faced with ever-increasing tax bills while the government’s income (because it was paid in copper) remained static. As people needed more and more cash, the price of silver skyrocketed, and rather than spend it, private individuals and the government began to hoard the metal. In the circumstances of this inflationary crisis, silver’s value as a currency was marginalised. It therefore made economic sense to export silver in exchange for consumer goods, even opium.50 But it was much easier for officials to blame China’s economic crisis on the imbalance of trade inflicted upon them by unscrupulous foreign merchants than it was to address the problem by improving the copper coinage and creating a stable silver currency.51 The issue of silver, opium and the balance of trade was a smokescreen.
The Ch’ing government oscillated between xenophobic resentment and opportunism in its attitude towards foreign trade.52 The emperor wanted to preserve social stability by keeping the foreigners at arm’s length. Their intrusion into the country was therefore limited to designated trading entrepôts. However, it was in the interests of the government, and the emperor himself, to keep the Canton trade open and buoyant. The Hoppo, the superintendent of the maritime customs at Canton, paid a large share of the trading revenue into the emperor’s private purse.53 By the 1830s, a good proportion of this would have come indirectly from the trade in opium; thus it was not really to the advantage of either side to bring it to a halt. Nevertheless, it was becoming something of an embarrassment. The emperor and his government were humiliated by rumours that both the military and the Chinese merchants were openly conniving in the illegal trade.54
An ‘inner opium war’ broke out between rival factions within the Chinese governing classes. The response of the xenophobic section among Chinese officials was to call for a trade embargo. The emperor and his government, however, knew that this was neither in the government’s financial interest, nor was it enforceable. In May 1836, Juan Yuan, the leader of a group of bureaucrats in alliance with a Canton-based merchants’ academy, the Hsueh-hai’t’ang, suggested to the emperor that the problem would best be tackled by both legalising the import of Indian opium and encouraging domestic production. This would hopefully pull the carpet out from under the smugglers’ feet and allow the government to regulate both the trade and the drug’s consumption. But while Yuan’s measures were being deliberated, and enthusiastically endorsed by the leader of the Canton merchants, a group of dissatisfied literati calling themselves the Spring Purification movement persuaded the emperor to drop his legalisation plans and embark on a crusade against opium addiction.55
The Spring Purification party were intent on implementing a moral programme to rejuvenate the scholarly official class, who were some of the most notorious opium users in society.56 Motivated by a desire for a more powerful position within the government, their leader, Juang Chueh-tzu, provided the emperor with proof that the Canton merchants were implicated in illegal currency dealings and the opium trade.57 In response, the emperor scrapped Yuan’s legalisation plans and appointed the Spring Purification party’s ally, Lin Tse-hsu, as governor general of Canton. It was Lin who forced a diplomatic impasse in June 1839 by seizing and destroying the opium in the European factories within Canton and closing the channel to shipping, in effect imprisoning the foreign traders in the city.58
By the mid nineteenth century, British imperialists had embraced the ideology of free trade and were embarked upon a tireless crusade to break down protectionism in foreign countries in order to open up new markets for their own export industries. Having discovered in India how expensive territorial acquisitions could be, they sought to create an ‘informal empire’ of economic hegemony. In Latin America, they were in dispute over what they considered to be unfair tariffs with the new nations that had arisen from the wreck of the Spanish Empire. Earlier that year, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, had sent gun boats to the Bay of Naples to force the Neapolitans to reduce their trading tariffs.59 The India–China opium trade was too lucrative to relinquish. The sale of opium accounted for 20 per cent of Indian revenues, the duties on tea imports earned the British Exchequer one tenth of their total revenue and the sale of Chinese goods on the international market funded Britain’s purchases of raw cotton from America to feed its textile mills.60 When William Jardine, until recently the foremost of Canton’s opium merchants, arrived in London two months after the Chinese seizure of the Europeans’ opium (having retired from Canton that January), he immediately began pressing Lord Palmerston to wage war on China in retaliation. It had long been his aim to use force to open up trade with China, and he now saw his opportunity to persuade the British government to help.
In November 1839, a British fleet arrived off the coast of Canton – including the Nemesis, the first iron paddle steamer to round the Cape of Good Hope – equipped with shells and Congreve rockets against which China’s defences were hopelessly inadequate.61 The Chinese lacked both the military structure and the bureaucratic organisation to resist the imposition of the imperial global trading system, and the war ended ignominiously for them in August 1842 when they signed the Treaty of Nanking, still referred to in China as ‘the first of the unequal treaties’. The British succeeded in their crusade to access new markets for their growing export industries and forced the Chinese to open five ‘treaty ports’ to their ships. The British government was uninterested in gaining anything other than a secure trading regime with the Chinese. It was even reluctant to take on the unpromising rocky island of Hong Kong, which the merchants wanted as a safe haven.62
Canton returned to business as usual, with Chinese officials once more taking a cut as part of the smugglers’ protection racket. Opium smoking continued to grow in popularity and the government carried on blaming its fiscal problems on the imbalance caused by the flow of silver to pay for opium imports. The drug became the focus of a mass movement of young gentry and students, for whom opium smokers came to symbolise China’s inability to resist Europe’s intrusion into its economy. They campaigned tirelessly against its use as demeaning and unpatriotic.63 In colonial America, tea had similarly become a symbol of the arrogant imposition of British power.64 There, however, tea drinking was at worst presented as disloyal, whereas in China opium smoking was regarded as a degenerate practice. Opium was, therefore, an ideal scapegoat for both Chinese nationalists and critics of colonialism’s exploitative economics.65
For this reason, the shocked accounts of foreign missionaries and travellers who described the havoc wrought on Chinese society by opium should be treated with some caution. The Chinese opium dens supposedly occupied by skeletal addicts were in fact doss houses where labourers could eat, sleep and relax by ‘chasing the dragon’ in the bowl of an opium pipe.66 When the American journalist F. H. Nichols travelled through the famine-stricken province of Shensi in 1900, the peasants he described – their faces ‘drawn and leathery, their eyes dull and glazed’ – were victims of starvation rather than opium addiction, and those he observed smoking were probably using the drug’s appetite-suppressing qualities to stave off hunger pangs.67 The end result of the campaign of moral outrage was the first international Opium Commission, which met in Shanghai in 1909. The Commission agreed to make illegal all trade in narcotic substances and to apply this principle globally. These commitments are the source of our contemporary legal framework outlawing opium and its derivatives.68
Elements of the opium myth are undoubtedly true. That the East India Company exploited poppy cultivators is undeniable; that it immiserated them is more questionable. That the opium trade was a mechanism whereby the East India Company was able to drain substantial amounts of money out of India is undoubtedly correct, but the causes of China’s silver famine were far more complex than a simple trade imbalance. That the British were ruthless in their determination to impose their trading system on China in order to secure supplies of the stimulant that was by now essential to their working classes is without a doubt the case, but that in doing so they inflicted a heinous drug on the Chinese people is hyperbole.