Opium was the Victorians’ ibuprofen
Smoke And Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories
In the 19th Century, there was one supreme drugs cartel that ruled the world. It was called the British Empire, and the drug it was growing and selling was opium. Opium wasn’t illegal then but was the standard painkilling drug for much of the world. It was the Victorians’ ibuprofen – and in fact you will have used it yourself if you’ve ever taken Imodium, Solpadeine or any cough medicine containing codeine.
The drug has an ancient history of usage, from a 6,000-year-old archaeological site in Switzerland to 16th Century India, when the Mughal Emperor Jahangir was recorded as enjoying ‘six draughts of alcohol each evening and a draught of opium.’
The Indian writer Amitav Ghosh is clearly obsessed with the subject, but it should be made clear from the start that he has not given us here a straightforward history of the opium trade, or of Britain’s dubious Opium Wars with China, but rather a series of authorial reflections, and sometimes there’s the distinct, grating sound of an axe being ground. The author leaves you in no doubt that he thinks the West in general, and Britain in particular, are to blame for pretty much everything.
Yet at other times the book depicts so much complexity in the opium trade that the author’s simplistic views fall apart. The reality of the opium trade was that it was highly multi-cultural. The wealthiest merchant-princes of the opium trade, he tells us, included the Baghdadi Jewish family, the Sassoons, based in Bombay, while the man then known as the ‘Rothschild of opium’ was a Marwari Hindu called Seth Bahadur Mal. What tarnished the opium trade, was when the British Empire fought two wars, 1839-1842, and again in 18561860, to force China to open up and accept as much opium as Britain could flood into the country: more than 5,000 tons by the 1880s, the profits producing some 20% of all the Raj’s revenue. It was not a glorious moment.
By the turn of the 20th Century,
China itself had become a vast producer of opium, responsible for ‘seven eights of global supply’. Then Ghosh compares this with today’s USA, for decades, like China, so amiably confident in its own status as an unchallenged superpower. Today it is a more uneasy and divided country, alas, and in its post-industrial rustbelt towns and forgotten backwoods, opium and its various derivatives and synthetic versions like fentanyl have taken a terrible toll, causing the deaths of 400,000 Americans. It’s a frightening parallel.