Review | Smoke and Ashes

A history of the 19th century reveals that opium was central to the development of British and American capitalism and imperialism, writes Neil Rogall.

The anticolonial uprising of 1857-1858 in northern India was a crucial moment in the history of both South Asia and the British Empire.  After the defeat of the insurgency at the hands of a merciless imperial army, the ruler of much of the subcontinent, the East India Company, was dissolved by the British parliament and India became a direct possession of the British crown. It also marked a turning point ideologically in Britain – along with the Jamaican uprising of 1865, the Morant Bay Rebellion – with an acceleration in the level of overt racism to black and brown peoples and the development of ‘scientific’ racism.

I studied the rebellion at university and then taught it in both further and higher education. Until I read this book I thought I had a good grasp of the interlocking causes of this huge movement that swept the Gangetic plain in 1857-8. Yet until I picked up this gripping book, I hadn’t realised that there was one significant factor I wasn’t aware of at all, nor did any of my academic sources ever hint at it. 

The Indian author, Amitav Ghosh, wrote a fantastic trilogy of novels, the Ibis trilogy, about opium production, the British Empire, India and China. If anything, this history is even more stunning. I had little idea that opium production produced the most profits for the East India Company and then the British Raj during colonial rule. At its peak, opium comprised half of all Indian exports and most of the opium went to China to pay for British purchases of Chinese tea. It was the largest commerce of its time in the world. It was the dominant crop of much of northern India (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand today). Facing criticism of this trade in addiction, the British insisted that ending the opium trade would harm vast numbers of peasants. This was a total lie – the cultivators growing opium were compelled to by their British rulers, even though they lost money growing it. Many peasants went bankrupt and many emigrated in desperation to Mauritius, Guyana and South Africa as indentured labourers, packed in the holds of former slave ships barely altered for their new human cargo.

It was these cultivators of this deadly crop in northern India along with the Indian soldiers (the sepoys employed by the East India Company) who came from the same villages and communities who rose in rebellion. 1857 was an uprising against the world’s first narcostate, Britain.

There was however a second opium trade in India, in western India. This was not controlled by the British but by western Indian trading communities – Hindu castes such as the Marwaris but also Muslim, Parsee and Jewish ones. Unlike the British-controlled northern opium trade based in Calcutta, most of the western trade’s profits ended up in the hands of Indian capitalists (though the colonial state profited from taxes at the ports). The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation founded in 1865 was funded by the opium trade and was owned by wealthy Indian Parsees and by David Sassoon from the Baghdadi Jewish community. That today HSBC is a major player in the world economy shows the close links between opium and the development of capitalism worldwide. The Indian-owned textile industry that developed in western India in the late 19th century was based on the addiction of millions of Chinese people. In contrast, no Indian-owned industries developed in northern and eastern India because all the opium profits went to Britain.

The Chinese were the main victims of the opium trade. But some Chinese merchant communities profited from it. The Peranakan (‘Straits Chinese’) diasporic community in particular played the same role as the Parsees in India. Opium provided the seed capital for many modern South East Asian enterprises. 

The staggering reality is that many of the cities that are pillars of the modern globalised economy – Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai were sustained by opium. Opium was the foundation of the modern globalised economy. 

A crop produced by poor Asian farmers under colonial auspices was consumed by an exploited workforce in the mines and plantations of the colonial empires at the cost of their lives.

Later in the book the focus changes to the US opium trade which similarly became a key funder of so many American banking and trading firms. The drug money that American entrepreneurs made in China financed the USA’s Industrial Revolution, founded and funded universities, libraries, churches and hospitals. The USA, like Britain, was built on both slavery and opium. And the US opium trade is still causing untold misery as Ghosh repeatedly points out – no longer in China, but among poor working class communities in the US with Purdue Pharma’s marketing of opioids over the last decades.  

Ghosh’s book is not a dry academic text but extremely readable. In particular I loved the author’s description of the foreigner’s enclave in Canton where opium was stored for distribution in China before the first British attack on China in 1839. There were 13 factories there, each belonging to a different nationality. They consisted of offices, warehouses, bedrooms and banqueting rooms. The inhabitants were solely men. The British, the largest and most powerful ‘community’, frequently had social events with orchestras playing and the British men, very rich and powerful men at that, would dance together, in strictly formal style, each taking one of the gendered roles.

There is even something in the book for gardeners. Canton was a garden city where Chinese horticulturalists bred all these beautiful flowers. Ghosh points out that many flowers – azaleas, chrysanthemums, wisteria and hydrangeas – all found in English gardens, things we imagine as quintessentially English, were first created in Canton. When Britain attacked China in the first of the Opium Wars, the combatants were instructed to steal plants to bring to Britain whil they were murdering Chinese people. 

This is a really fascinating book but it does deserve one health warning. Despite his status as a novelist and historian who is avowedly anti-colonial, Ghosh has not used his influence to speak out on the genocide in Gaza. That is shameful.

Amitav Ghosh: Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023)