A Story of Opium.

Submitted by mmghosh on Sat, 07/12/2008 - 8:38pm. Tags:

Social Issues

BlaiseP's recent diary on the the problems in this region gives a flavour of the importance of the drug trade in this part of the world.

Historically, of course, the drug trade was one of the major reasons why an entity such as the East India Company remained profitable at all, as an organised and legitimated drug running ring. There will be a novel on this issue by a favourite author of mine (no relation) - out in October. (Other recommendations).

Excerpts from a BBC interview:

Sea of Poppies is a historical novel. Is it the fact that the British were the world's biggest opium suppliers two centuries ago that led you into this story?

I should correct you. It was not two centuries ago. Under the British Raj, an enormous amount of opium was being exported out of India until the 1920s.
And no, the opium story was not really the trigger for the novel. What basically interested me when I started this book were the lives of the Indian indentured workers, especially those who left India from the Bihar region.

But once I started researching into it, it was kind of inescapable - all the roads led back to opium. The indentured emigration [out of India] really started in the 1830s and that was [around the time of] the peak of the opium traffic. That decade culminated in the opium wars against China.
Also all the indentured workers at that time came from all the opium growing regions in the Benares and Ghazipur areas. So there was such an overlap there was no escaping opium.

When and how did you end up researching and learning more about the British opium trade out of India?

I was looking into it as I began writing the book about five years ago. Like most Indians, I had very little idea about opium.
I had no idea that India was the largest opium exporter for centuries. I had no idea that opium was essentially the commodity which financed the British Raj in India.It is not a coincidence that 20 years after the opium trade stopped, the Raj more or less packed up its bags and left. India was not a paying proposition any longer.

What did you discover in the course of your research? How big was the trade?

Opium steadily accounted for about 17-20% of Indian revenues. If you think in those terms, [the fact that] one single commodity accounted for such an enormous part of your economy is unbelievable, extraordinary.
In fact the revenues don't account for entire profits generated [out of opium trade] -there was shipping, there were so many ancillary industries around opium.

How and when did opium exports out of India to China begin?

The idea of exporting opium to China started with Warren Hastings (the first governor general of British India) in 1780.
The situation was eerily similar to [what is happening] today. There was a huge balance of payments problem in relation to China. China was exporting enormous amounts, but wasn't interested in importing any European goods. That was when Hastings came up with idea that the only way of balancing trade was to export opium to China.
In the 1780s he sent the first shipment of opium to China. It was a small shipment and they could hardly get rid of it. There wasn't much demand. [But], within 10 years, demand for opium increased by factors of magnitude. It was incredible - within a period of 10-30 years how much the opium trade spread and increased.

Of course, we have known for a while about the opium trade in India - we are taught about it in school. And also of course, what is often hidden, like the history of the slave trade to the US, is the active and enthusiastic co-opting and collusion by sections of our own population in the trade. The world's largest legal Opium and Alkaloid factory continues in India - in Ghazipur, which interestingly is also where Lord Cornwallis is buried, after wreaking his particular havoc in North America, India and Ireland.

By the 1820s a large number of Parsis, Marwaris, Gujarati Banias and Konkani Muslims had moved into the opium trade at Mumbai. Of the 42 foreign firms operating in China at the end of the 1830s, 20 were fully owned by Parsis. Indigenous shipping and opium trade too were closely interlinked.

For two decades the figure who dominated the opium trade at Bombay was Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy (1783-1859). He was the first Indian to be knighted (1842), the first to win a baronetcy (1857) who partnered Jardine and Matheson, the largest opium trading network in China. Apart from owning ships, agents and commercial clearing houses, he was also one of the six directors of the Bank of Bombay.

It was the capital accumulation of these years that allowed these same people to later on lay the foundations of an industrial Bombay and build the grand public buildings that survive in south Bombay. From being an obscure port which could not even generate its own revenues, Bombay’s transformation into one of the leading cities of the Empire occurred fairly rapidly within the space of about half a century, between the 1790s and 1840s.

The "inversion" here, of course, is that the modern opium trade is within the West; it is presumably within the capacities of the modern Western nation-state to put an end to the demand, as, in fact, modern China did so effectively under the Nationalists and Mao. The opium drug culture did not exist in China before the mid 18th century, and was wiped out by a concerted effort by the Chinese 150 years later. A heroin culture certainly did not exist in the West 150 years ago - should it not be possible to eradicate it today? The present situation in Afghanistan:

According to a report released today by the National Security Network (NSN), Afghanistan's poppy crop, in terms of the acreage of land used for its cultivation, goes beyond anything Colombia's cocaine kings would dare to dream. It's the country's largest export, worth more than $4 billion per year and employing some 3.3 million Afghans. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that last year's harvest was of "unprecedented size in modern times and unseen since the opium boom in China during the nineteenth century." So much for the War on Drugs.

An excerpt from the NSN report:

In plain view of the United States and the international community, the opium trade is overwhelming Afghanistan’s legitimate government. The facts are stunning: in 2001, after a Taliban ban on poppy cultivation, Afghanistan only produced 11 percent of the world’s opium. Today it produces 93 percent of the global crop; the drug trade accounts for half of its GDP; and nearly one in seven Afghans is involved in the opium trade. In Afghanistan, more land is being used for poppy cultivation than for coca cultivation in all of Latin America. The trade strengthens the government’s enemies and – unless its large place in the Afghan economy is permanently curtailed by crop replacements and anti-poverty efforts – poses a potentially fatal obstacle to keeping the country stable and peaceful.

Manish Ghosh

mmghosh's blog
Login or register to post comments

Interesting, Mr. Ghosh, but... (#102964)

by vinteuil on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 2:14pm

...what's up with this passage:

"...what is often hidden, like the history of the slave trade to the US..."

???

Do you really think that the "history of the slave trade to the US" is "hidden?"

From whom? By whom? Since when?

Live not by lies.

(

)

The local African collusion with the slave trade? (#103110)

by mmghosh on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 7:50am

I think African collusion with slave trade is not given as much prominence as it could have been.

Slave trade by the Arabs into the middle east and into India is also glossed over. Did you know that there was an active slave trade into India, for example?

There is a cultural difference, of course, in the sense that slaves could and often did become Emperors in our cultures. That was not possible in the Americas - not until Mr Obama, I suppose.

Manish Ghosh

(

A Story of Opium.

Comment viewing options