The problem began with a flower, a delicate blossom with a slender stalk. It was a fragile-looking plant, with petals as fine as tissue paper, yet it proved to be a formidable opponent.
As the novelist Amitav Ghosh demonstrates in his new work of nonfiction, “Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories,” the unassuming opium poppy is to blame for much of the devastation that swept through China and India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course, the flower did not act alone: British colonialists and American merchants conspired to wreak havoc alongside it. Still, Ghosh’s impressive history of the opium industry is an attempt to acknowledge “the historical agency of botanical matter” — to understand the drug “as an actor in its own right.”
At first, the opium poppy took a back seat to another history-defining plant: tea. The British drank it by the gallon and lined their coffers by taxing it aggressively. “Through much of the Industrial Revolution,” Ghosh writes, “the finances of the British government were heavily dependent on tea, the vast bulk of which came from China.” But eager British merchants soon encountered a difficulty: China was uninterested in the wares they had to offer in return. As the Qianlong Emperor observed in a withering letter to King George III in 1793, “We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.” The two commodities that did tempt Chinese traders both came from other influential plants. The first was cotton; the second was a nefarious substance “harvested from a variety of poppy, Papaver somniferum.”
China banned the importation of opium as early as 1729, for which reason the East India Company “could not formally or explicitly acknowledge that its opium was intended for the Chinese market.” But it did not take long for British capitalists to devise a workaround: Instead of selling the drug in China directly, they auctioned it off to “private traders,” who proceeded to smuggle it into the country. When China attempted to crack down in the late 1830s and early 1840s, Britain contrived an excuse to attack. The first Opium War lasted four years, and when it ended, the opium trade continued apace. In 1860, the British went so far as to pressure the Chinese to legalize the drug, with predictably devastating consequences for local populations.
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Opium’s analgesic properties have been treasured by physicians for centuries — and the drug has been a favorite of courtly elites as far back as antiquity — but recreational usage did not become widespread until the 19th century, when the arduous cultivation and refinement process was streamlined and industrialized. Poppies require an enormous amount of water and care, and even when the finicky flowers have been coaxed to bloom, it is no trifling matter to transform them into a smokable substance. “As recently as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” Ghosh explains, “it would take almost an entire year for poppy sap to be converted into usable opium.”
The Indian opium industry was therefore not the sort of thing that could spring up by happenstance, nor was it a time-honored feature of life on the subcontinent. Although the British colonial regime worked hard to promote the self-serving myth “that opium was a traditional Indian drug,” Ghosh shows that tradition had nothing to do with its eventual ubiquity in the country. Before the British established a veritable “narco-state” in the 1760s, poppies were not harvested in India at scale.
The enormously lucrative and immensely destructive regime that emerged had two central seats, one “around Patna” (modern-day Bihar) in eastern India and one in Malwa (now, roughly, Mumbai and the surrounding regions) in the west. The Bihar outpost was especially exploitative. The farmers who worked there were permitted to sell poppies only to agents of the East India Company, and the infamous Opium Department that reigned over local production was tyrannical, even proto-totalitarian, determining specifics such as “which farmers could grow poppies” and “how much they could plant.” The department’s employees exercised what Ghosh describes as “seigneurial powers in the villages where they were posted: they could break open doors, raid houses and arrest farmers almost at will.” To deter smugglers, the East India Company hired “large numbers of spies and informants” and offered them rewards for ratting on their neighbors.
To make matters even worse, the farmers were so poorly compensated that they operated at a loss. “We cultivate the poppy under pressure from Government, otherwise we would not do it, and our prayer is that we may be released from this trouble,” hundreds of them lamented in a fruitless petition. Meanwhile, in the cities, Indian laborers were compelled to work in hot, congested processing plants that were cloudy with opium fumes. And of course, while the Indigenous populations in both the cities and the countryside languished in poverty, the British official presiding over the arrangement lived in a luxurious manor.
The Malwa opium growers fared somewhat better, largely because they were fortunate enough to hail from a territory that maintained its independence for several decades longer — a development that made all the difference to the economic fate of western India in the long run. British authorities did not annex the region until the early 1800s, and when they tried to protect their monopoly by banning opium farming, the poppy defied them: Flowers continued to grow, and the black market continued to flourish. “Faced with an overwhelming asymmetry in military power, there were very few weapons that the colonized could resort to,” Ghosh observes. “The clandestine opium trade thus became an instrument of resistance,” as well as a way of generating the wealth that would eventually contribute to the prosperity of present-day Mumbai. Bihar, on the other hand, remains the poorest state in India.
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By the time Britain took charge of Malwa, opium had become a desirable good in its own right for one simple reason: Millions of people were violently addicted to it. By the end of the 19th century, at least 3 to 10 percent of the Chinese population, and possibly as much as 30 or 40 percent, were regular users. Western traders justified their behavior by appealing to the newly popular ideology of the free market. Supply, they insisted, always chased demand; if they manufactured and sold enormous quantities of opium, it was only because the Chinese had a preexisting weakness for it (a charge, of course, with racist undertones). But as Ghosh eloquently argues, “Where plentiful supplies of opioids exist, they will create their own demand,” especially when they are backed by a military power keen on maximizing its profits. Human economic laws are no match for the dark designs of the poppy.
The Western merchants who profited so handsomely from the opium trade were often politely euphemistic about the source of their wealth, probably in an attempt to minimize their role in an enterprise that they quietly acknowledged to be unjust. Yet the fruits of the industry are all around us.
Among the Americans who dominated the industry were the moguls designated by Oliver Wendell Holmes as the “Boston Brahmins.” As Ghosh remarks wryly, the names of these elite entrepreneurs “read like a litany of the Northeastern upper crust.” Their descendants included the likes of John Murray Forbes and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and their predilection for chinoiserie and Chinese-inspired architecture endures in America’s visual landscape.
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By far the most enduring legacy of the West’s ill-fated adventure in the opium trade, however, is the opioid epidemic, which has killed more than half a million Americans in the last decade alone. To this day, the largest opioid-manufacturing plants are located in India. As “Smoke and Ashes” shows in forceful, even thundering, prose, the Boston Brahmins and the East India Company unleashed an evil they could not restrain. They believed they could keep opium out of their own countries, but, as Ghosh writes, they did not understand “that they were colluding not only with human criminals but also with non-human entities that operate on a wholly different timescale.” Who can tell if humanity will ever be able to defeat the humble flower?
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
Smoke and Ashes
Opium’s Hidden Histories
By Amitav Ghosh
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 398 pp. $32
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