AMITAV GHOSH Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s hidden histories. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

Award-winning novelist Amitav Ghosh turns to non-fiction to chart the greed and racism at the heart of British and American opium sales to China.

In researching his Ibis Trilogy novels – Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) – which dealt with the nineteenth-century opium trade between India and China, Amitav Ghosh discovered that his own ‘identity and family history were swept up in the story’. It inspired him to produce this history of the opium trade, with a list of references that runs to over 70 pages (and includes work by Marcia Langton on the treatment of Indigenous Australians by the British in the nineteenth century).

Smoke and Ashes links the interaction of two plants, tea and opium, with two countries, India and China. It encompasses the relationship between the West and the East, colonialism and underdevelopment. Tea was a plant and a drink developed in China. The British developed a taste for it, and imported huge quantities of it. The problem was there was little the Chinese wanted from the British in exchange, other than silver bullion.

The solution was to export opium from British-ruled India to China. A large portion of this trade was controlled by the East India Company. (American entrepreneurs would also become involved in the latter part of the nineteenth century.) This trade in opium lasted for approximately one and a half centuries, from the mid-1700s to the early 1890s. Ghosh examines the impact of the trade on India, China, Britain and America, as well as exploring broader lessons of the human condition.

The East India Company strictly controlled the production and distribution of opium in East India. Farmers were forced into virtual conscription or debt bondage to grow poppies under close supervision. Informers were employed to ensure that contracts were observed. This in turn produced systems of corruption and bribery as farmers and the retinue of intermediaries associated with the trade sought to grow other crops, sold produce on the black market or kept opium for their own use. According to Ghosh, this explains why East India is more backward, impoverished, and more radical in its politics than other parts of India.

To maintain its control, the East India Company employed a large army, which provided security and careers for its members. Many of these personnel came from the Punjab, and the British invested in infrastructure in the Punjab to maintain the loyalty of Punjabi troops. This helps to explain the Punjab’s prosperity relative to other parts of India.

The East India Company was unable to control the opium trade in West India around Bombay (now Mumbai) – the resistance of local elites was too strong. Even though the British eventually regulated and taxed the trade, space was left for local elites to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit where profits from opium spread to other ventures, which explains the vibrancy of Mumbai and Western India today.

Opium was devastating for China. Throughout this period, the country was dominated by colonial powers and lost two wars (1839 to 1842, and 1856 to 1860) attempting to block British imports of opium. Ghosh reports that at the beginning of the twentieth century, 30 to 40 per cent of the population were consuming opium – ‘possibly as many as 200 million people’. The impact on Chinese society was devastating.

… every institution that had once commanded trust – the monarchy, the bureaucracy, the legal system – began to visibly crumble. At the same time, the spread of opium dependency also destabilized the cornerstone of the Confucian order – the family – with parents abandoning their traditional duties and relatives stealing from each other to fund their habit.

Britain’s expansion across the globe was financed by profits from the opium trade. American entrepreneurs (Boston Brahmins) deployed their profits from opium into other areas such as banking and finance to enhance the status of their families and propel the growth and development of America in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also became paragons of virtue, endowing churches, universities and other public institutions.

Ghosh asks how it was possible for the British and Americans to rationalise what they were doing.

It is important to remember that no matter how genteel their manners, no matter how earnest their religious fervour, the British and American traders … belonged to an Anglo-American elite that had made a fine art of spouting pieties of various kinds while inflicting immeasurable harm on people around the world. The English in particular, with their endless moralizing, were often able to persuade people that anything they did was ipso facto respectable no matter how indefensible it might appear.

Regarding the Americans, Ghosh points to the importance of the intersection of class and race.

If anything, the social stigma on drug dealing was even more powerful than it is now … What was truly different then was that it was not considered untoward for white men to inflict incalculable harm on other peoples, especially 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.

One of the continuing themes of Smoke and Ashes is that of plants as independent actors that have control over us. Both opium and tea have the ability to change the way humans behave. Opium, in particular, can make addicts do anything once they fall under its spell. Ghosh forces us to think about our interactions with the natural world and what is in store for us if we ignore its laws.

… the British, unbeknownst to themselves, are … also [servants] of the opium poppy; they who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are actually serving the purposes of a Being whose vitality and power they are incapable of acknowledging … in colonizing… poppy fields …the colonizers have themselves been colonized – by a non-human entity whose intelligence, patience and longevity far exceed that of humans.

In considering the harm opium has inflicted on so many humans, Ghosh speculates:

It is almost as if the elders of the plant kingdom, having concluded that Homo sapiens was too dangerous an animal to be allowed to survive, had given humankind a gift that they knew would be used by the most ruthless and powerful of the species to build economic systems that would slowly, inexorably, bring about the end of their civilizations.

Near the end of Smoke and Ashes Ghosh says that at one point he decided to abandon this project, overcome by feelings of despair at the ‘bleak and unedifying story’ he was unravelling.

… what was truly new about the great ‘take-off’ of the nineteenth century was that it created a system in which indifference was not just accepted by ruling elites but was justified and promoted by a plethora of false teleologies and deceptive theories. What this led to was, for the most part, a kind of ‘slow violence’, inflicted not by weaponry but rather by inaction, and refusals to intervene. Such violence gives the appearance of being – and indeed, often is – unintentional because it is enabled principally by institutional indifference. It is this that made it possible for European empires to push opium on China and Southeast Asia, and it is what makes it possible today for the wealthy and powerful to be suicidally indifferent to the prospect of a global catastrophe.

Because of his fears of ‘the climate-intensified events of recent years’, he found a way to continue and complete his investigation into ‘a botanical entity [which] is both [an] instrument and [a] protagonist’. He worries about what lies in store for us if we fail to address what is currently happening.

At a time when elite hucksters and all-powerful billionaires are trying to peddle the idea of solar geoengineering, there is nothing more important than to remember that every one of the interconnected crises that humanity now confronts is the unintended consequence of interconnections conceived by men who believed that their superior education and privilege entitled them to over-ride all customary common-sense constraints.

Amitav Ghosh has provided a masterful account of the role that opium has played, and continues to play, in the history of the world. He not only highlights the workings of colonialism, but also the role of the East India Company and the British government in operating a drug cartel for 150 years. He demonstrates the important role that opium played in shaping the relations between nations, and between East and West, and the propensity of those with power to take advantage of those without.

Many in the West established their wealth and influence through the exploitation of Indian farmers and the millions of Chinese they hooked on opium. Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s hidden histories is an important book that raises fundamental questions about who and what we are. It should be read by all of us.

Amitav Ghosh Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s hidden histories John Murray 2024 PB 416pp $34.99.

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

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Tags: addiction, Amitav | Ghosh, British and American opium trade, China, colonialism, East India Company, India, opium, Opium Wars, racism, tea