What Opium’s History Tells Us about Today’s Drug War

• Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories
• Amitav Ghosh
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024)

Having written three novels on the 19th-century opium trade, Amitav Ghosh revisits the subject in his 2024 book Smoke and Ashes, a non-fiction account that draws on very recent research. Opium’s hidden histories are also the hidden histories of the British Empire and the United States as the oldest, most successful drug cartels the world has ever seen.

Ghosh previously wrote The Nutmeg’s Curse, arguing that capitalism derives from a 17th-century European belief that nothing has value except as it benefits white male Europeans. According to this view, anything, and any person, can be exploited if a European can profit from that exploitation.

Smoke and Ashes is a kind of case in point, describing the enormous wealth derived from the exploitation of the opium poppy and the millions whose lives have been ruined and ended by it, right up to today’s Vancouver.

An insatiable thirst for tea

The histories of opium begin with the story of tea, which Ghosh traces back over 2,000 years. It began as an elite consumer good and spread rapidly across China. In the 16th century, Portuguese traders based in Macau began shipping tea home, where it became popular with the upper classes. When Catherine of Braganza married Britain’s King Charles II in 1662, Ghosh tells us, the Portuguese princess brought with her “two things that would prove to be of world-historical importance: a casket of tea and a set of six small islands that would later become Bombay (now Mumbai).”

By the 18th century, Britain’s thirst for tea was insatiable — and highly taxable. Tea revenues funded the East India Co.’s expansion in eastern India and British colonization all over the world.

“Through much of the 18th and 19th centuries,” Ghosh tells us, “the tax on tea accounted for nearly a tenth of Britain’s revenues. It earned the British government as much as all land, property and income taxes put together: so vast was this sum of money that it could pay for the salaries of all government servants; for all public works and buildings; for all expenses related to law, justice, education, art and science; and for Her Majesty’s colonial, consular and foreign establishments — combined.”

The East India Co. bought almost all its tea from China, but it had few trade goods to offer China’s giant, self-sufficient economy. The company had to pay for it in gold or silver.

Opium’s early division between rich and poor

Opium, meanwhile, had been known for centuries as a painkiller, but it required long processing that made it expensive. That limited its use to wealthy elites, but cheaper processing opened it up to ordinary people — a pattern repeated up to the present day.

In South Asia, opium (sometimes mixed with other drugs) was usually eaten, but only by rulers and aristocrats; smoking it was regarded as dangerous. It was stored and shipped in standard “chests” weighing about 65 kilograms. Through the 16th and 17th centuries, very little was produced in India, perhaps 10,000 chests altogether.

That changed when Dutch traders began using opium as a gift to kings in southwest India. Soon demand was so high that opium became a currency to purchase pepper and other spices, not only in India but in Indonesia. The British soon caught on, realizing that opium created its own demand. They developed a version that was mostly tobacco, soaked in liquid opium, that could be smoked.

An offer China couldn’t refuse

Here was a product the market in China would welcome, something that the East India Co. could barter for tea.

Knowing how dangerous opium could be, China’s Qing rulers had banned its importation in 1729. But by the 1770s, the East India Co. was determined to smuggle opium into China in exchange for tea and other goods.

It turned out to be very easy. Company ships would sail to the Pearl River delta in southern China’s Guangdong province. They would rendezvous with local dealers, who would pay in gold and silver for opium.

The empty ships would then go up the river to Guangzhou (also called Canton), the only Chinese port open to foreign traders. Company traders would buy tea and other trade goods with gold and silver, and then sail back to India, where their cargoes were sent on to Britain. (What the British considered “fine china” was second-rate porcelain rejected by Chinese consumers.)

By the early 19th century, the East India Co.’s Opium Department was a giant agribusiness ruling much of eastern India. Farmers were ordered to grow only poppies, and to sell only to the department, at a low price that didn’t even cover the farmers’ costs.

The system was designed for corruption. Farmers secretly grew other crops, or sold opium to non-department buyers. To do so, they bribed officials, who then offered cuts to their superiors — who made fortunes.

After selling only about 200 chests a year to China during the 18th century, the East India Co.’s Opium Department was selling close to 5,000 chests a year in the early 1800s. In the 1830s, the Chinese government actually shut down the smuggling.

That led to the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when the East India Co. and other foreign traders forced the Chinese government to accept the opium trade.

Calling it “the world’s first drug cartel,” Ghosh writes: “This system was, therefore, on its own terms, one of the most successful commercial ventures in human history, producing immense profits for the British Empire for well over a hundred years. The opium trade was thus an essential element of an emerging capitalist system that was then spreading rapidly across the globe. Yet, far from being a free market, this system was firmly founded on colonialism and race.”

Orwell’s father was a dope dealer

Ghosh’s description of the opium trade is fascinating, horrifying and often surprising. I was dumbfounded to learn that George Orwell’s father was a bureaucrat in the Opium Department. The trade strongly influenced the cultures of India and China, but it also enabled China to exert remarkable influence on the cultures of Britain and especially the United States.

American traders had come to China in the late 18th century, soon after the revolution, and quickly developed their own business plan: sell American goods like tobacco in Turkey, buy opium and sail on to the Pearl River to swap the opium for tea, porcelain, silk and artworks.

Foreign traders in Guangzhou were obliged to live in a small enclave called the “13 Factories,” but they enjoyed a high standard of living — and the Americans, many of them from linked New England families, returned home with immense fortunes soon to be enlarged by investment in the booming U.S. economy.

Much of the young republic’s wealth stemmed from the opium trade. “By 1818,” Ghosh writes, “Americans were, by some estimates, smuggling as much as a third of all the opium consumed in China.”

From young drug lords to Boston Brahmins

The young drug lords of the “Boston Concern” were the founders of some of the greatest American family fortunes. Ghosh notes: “The wealth they gained from the opium trade would establish them as core members of the elite circle that Oliver Wendell Holmes called ‘the Boston Brahmins,’ America’s closest equivalent to an aristocracy.”

At least two later presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, traced their ancestry back to opium dealers. Opium profits invested in the United States led to a boom in industrial growth and the extension of railways.

“Canton” is the name of 28 American cities and towns, each likely founded or improved by a returned opium trader.

Opium traders were great supporters of university education. Abiel Abbot Low prospered in the opium trade; his son honoured him by building Low Library on the campus of Columbia University.

How Guangzhou changed America

Some of the traders were proteges of Wu Bingjian, an immensely rich Guangzhou merchant. Wu sent one American teenager home a millionaire. The Forbes brothers, after working for Wu in Guangzhou, founded an American business dynasty by becoming his U.S. investment managers, putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into American enterprises — especially railway lines.

Opium even triggered advances in marine architecture. The magnificent American clipper ships of the mid-19th century were designed to reach China and return in far less time than ordinary merchant vessels, thereby boosting profits.

“Sometimes,” Ghosh writes, “clippers would make the opium run between India and China two or even three times in a year.”

Living in Guangzhou was a transformative experience for young drug traders. They gained a new sense of how to express wealth: landscaped gardens full of Chinese plants like rhododendrons and camellias, beautifully designed mansions, exquisite porcelains and works of art. After sailing yachts in the Pearl River, the drug lords went home and made yachting a rich man’s sport.

As businessmen, the traders were impressed with Chinese regulations that insured bank deposits, and New York state created the first American version in 1829. The ancient Chinese examination system inspired the U.S. civil service exams, creating public servants on the basis of skill, not patronage.

A ‘Cantonized’ lifestyle

“These great American tycoons,” Ghosh argues, “invented a lifestyle back home that could be described as a ‘Cantonized’ way of living. Because of their social eminence, elements of this style were widely copied and eventually seeped deep into the fabric of American social life.”

But the drug lords knew opium was seeping equally deeply into the fabric of Chinese life, creating millions of addictions and gravely damaging China’s economy and institutions.

“What was truly different then,” Ghosh writes, “was that it was not considered untoward for white men to inflict incalculable harm on other peoples, especially if it was done in faraway places. In a country where Native Americans were being dispossessed and slain en masse, and where millions of enslaved Black people were toiling on plantations, selling opium to the distant Chinese probably did not appear particularly reprehensible.”

Shifting the stigma from pusher to addict

The young United States, in effect, prospered as a “narco-state,” much like Britain — except that the narcotics both countries dealt in were more or less legal. Like slavery, opium made some white Americans very rich.

But opium itself had a growing stigma. The drug lords of the 19th century soon preferred not to mention the source of their wealth. Instead, they villainized their Chinese victims.

This is one of the most valuable insights of Smoke and Ashes. The British and American opium traders admired and respected China, and emulated its displays of wealth in their own countries. Yet over time they came to despise the people they had bullied and corrupted.

Opium was ruining the lives of countless Chinese families, but now the rationale for selling it was precisely that the Chinese were supposedly degenerate by nature. The money earned in the trade would go to “development” and “progress” elsewhere in the world, especially at home.

So Chinese money could finance American railways, but the Chinese labourers who built them could be paid almost nothing and consoled with access to opium. China itself, whose wealth had attracted traders for centuries, could be corrupted and turned into prey for the “narco-states.”

China even tried legalizing opium, but that only made matters worse. By the early 20th century, an estimated 20 million people were addicted.

When the Communists took over in 1949, they banned opium production, put addicts into detox programs, executed over 800 dealers and imprisoned thousands more. By the 1990s, Ghosh tells us, only 70,000 addicts were reported in China.

Now we’re the victims

By then, of course, opium and its derivatives had evolved into a worldwide problem that we have mostly failed to solve. An average of seven British Columbians a day die of opioid overdoses — many of them involving fentanyl made in China.

One likely reason for this ongoing disaster is that we have failed to go beyond the American opium traders’ contempt for their consumers. It is easier to criticize the victims than to criticize ourselves for our complicity.

Conventional wisdom places a heavy weight on what are framed as personal failures of morality or character, not structural issues. According to this thinking, addiction is the addict’s problem, not the dealer’s — or the society’s. Poverty is the fault of the poor, disease is the fault of the sick, and it’s always easier to blame the victim than the victor.

The great 19th-century drug cartels largely made our world. Like successful gangsters, the cartels “went legit” by investing in manufacturing, transportation and the rising technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

But opium and opioids, which they unleashed upon the world, have corrupted the one-time “narco-states” just as they corrupted India and China. We are still living with the consequences.