British imperialism in India, and China

 

"Smoke and Ashes

By Amitav Ghosh

FSG, 416 pages, $32

Amitav Ghosh doesn't mince words, especially when writing of British imperialism in India, the land of his birth, or of Britain's role in China, the land of his moral obsessions. In "Smoke and Ashes" -- an indignant and occasionally eccentric account of "opium's hidden histories" -- Mr. Ghosh characterizes Britain as an "imperial narco-state" whose model was perfected in India and whose methods were ruthlessly applied in China. He quotes with approval an academic who charges the British East India Co. with creating the "world's first drug cartel."

These are startling labels to attach to the long and complex British colonial project, one that can be said -- if you're even modestly objective -- to have contributed much that was good to the lands where it was imposed. In the calculation of such writers as Nigel Biggar -- the author of "Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" (2023) -- the undeniable negatives of the British Empire are outweighed by its positive effect on colonized peoples.

But Mr. Ghosh has no time for positives -- perhaps inevitably, since his focus is exclusively on opium, a product whose unchecked trade had no obvious moral upside. In fact, opium had an effect on China so malign that it led to wars, widespread addiction and the systematic violation of Chinese sovereignty by Britain under the cynical guise of free trade.

Mr. Ghosh also contends that opium begat an impoverishment of large swaths of north-central India -- mostly the modern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh -- that persists to this day in the form of chronic backwardness. If 21st-century Bihar is a basket case, says Mr. Ghosh, it's because its peasants were coerced by the Brits to grow opium poppies in the 18th and 19th centuries, an operation that was overseen by the Opium Department (as it was called) of the East India Co.

It was a criminal offense, no less, to grow anything other than poppies on land designated as falling under the Opium Department's purview. No growing of food was permitted, nor any other sort of cash crop. The peasants cultivated poppies at a crippling loss and were compelled to sell it at a fixed price. The region, over time, became destitute and in thrall to criminal gangs and corrupt politicians.

Mr. Ghosh, among the finest novelists of Indian origin writing in the English language, is a social anthropologist by training. He studied the subject at Oxford, and his doctoral dissertation gave rise to his first published work of nonfiction -- "In an Antique Land" (1992) -- a centuries-long chronicle of two villages in the Nile Delta. In "Smoke and Ashes," he returns to these academic roots. His book portrays the socioeconomic and cultural impact of opium on the societies that produced, transported, traded and consumed the stupefacient in the two centuries before World War II.

Since Mr. Ghosh's politics are of the postcolonial left, his narrative ranges beyond straightforward imperial history and veers into critiques of modern capitalism, climate change and "structural racism." With multiple citations, he reveals the influence of Priya Satia, a hyper-progressive Stanford historian who has made a career out of scorning the idea that Western imperialism led to any sort of progress anywhere.

But Mr. Ghosh's research is rich enough to justify setting aside the leftist frills and fancies and dwelling instead on his main thrust -- which is the corrosive legacy of opium on the two great lands of the East, China and India.

Opium, Mr. Ghosh states, was a "pillar of empire." But its story begins with tea, which Britain imported at vast expense from China. The problem was that Britain had "nothing much to sell to China in return," since the Chinese had "little interest in, and no need for, most Western goods." This was irksome to the British, who found themselves having to pay for tea with silver. By the mid-18th century, this form of payment became onerous, and "finding a means of offsetting the drain of bullion now became a matter of increasing urgency." And so Britain hit upon a solution, diabolical and lucrative: the large-scale export to China of opium from India.

Opium would pay for tea and much more, transforming the Indian subcontinent and forcing China to open its ports and markets to Britain. The narcotic, in short order, acquired "the status of a strategic resource," Mr. Ghosh writes. The East India Co.'s "drug-pushing programme" was "astounding." He cites eye-popping figures: In the century between 1729 and 1830, the company's annual opium exports to China rose from 200 chests to 30,000 (with a single "chest" amounting to 140-160 pounds). From 1831 to 1840, China received as much opium from India as it had in the century preceding. After the two Opium Wars -- in which China was humiliated -- the British Empire's opium exports peaked, reaching nearly 106,000 chests in 1880. Opium earnings amounted to 10 million pounds sterling in the 1880s (nearly $2 billion today).

"Quite possibly," says Mr. Ghosh, "no single economic policy has ever been more successfully implemented than the British Empire's opium scheme." Within a few decades -- "exactly as intended" -- opium cured Britain's balance of payments migraine. The flow of bullion to China was reversed, and wealth now coursed out of China and toward Britain. The knock-on effect on India was apparent. The immiseration of Bihar notwithstanding, the opium trade enriched a wide range of Indian mercantile castes and communities, in particular the Parsis, who set themselves up as adroit intermediaries, transporting opium to Hong Kong, Guangzhou and beyond. The city of Bombay, which had been the poorer cousin of Calcutta, grew rich on opium and its associated wealth and opportunities, becoming the country's commercial capital -- a status it continues to enjoy to this day.

Mr. Ghosh is enlightening on the much-neglected story of America's hand in the opium trade, with East Coast shippers and traders following the East India Co. into China in a sort of Opium Rush. Denied access to Indian opium, the Americans sourced their product in Smyrna (now Izmir), in Turkey, and the need to transport opium across the seas led to the development of the Baltimore Clipper, the best ship of its kind. Among the most salient East Coast opium profiteers was Warren Delano, a grandfather of FDR.

Where Mr. Ghosh goes off the rails is in his ascription of personality -- even smarts and acumen -- to the poppy itself, "a Being whose vitality and power" the British were incapable of acknowledging. The poppy, he writes, is "a non-human entity whose intelligence, patience and longevity far exceed that of humans." It is tempting, here, to ask what Mr. Ghosh is smoking and to ask, perhaps, for some of it ourselves. But to do so would be to make light of a project -- and a period -- that brought the British no credit. In totting up the balance books of empire, there's no doubting where opium falls: on the debit side, an imperial sin for which there was no redemption.

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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society." [1]

We Lithuanians are lucky. When we sold pork for British breakfast in Smetona's time, the British didn't make us buy their opium. We didn't get hurt, that's why the British ruthless capitalism is so fashionable in Lithuania, which created the Lithuanian elite, which you can't call anything else, just cannibal: the elite are struggling with luxury Porsches, which clog Vilnius, and people can't even buy food normally.

1. REVIEW --- Books: Pipe Dreams of Empire. Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 02 Mar 2024: C.9.