As official residences go, Sir John Henry Rivett-Carnac’s company home was, as he wrote in his memoirs, “a quite magnificent house on the Ganges at Ghazipur, surrounded by a good garden and fine grounds.” Indoors it boasted a billiards room and the finest collection of paintings in India.
The foundations of this major job perk was the Benares Opium Agency that Sir John headed from 1876. Other perks included the all-paid-for option to escape to the Indian hills with his family and staff during the hot summers. When the poppy growing season got under way in November, Sir John would embark on a grand regional tour, interspersing inspections of opium farms with shooting expeditions and visits to colourful bazaars.
The penniless Indian farmers under his watch, who fed Ghazipur’s opium processing factory, knew no such comfort. They were coerced into cultivating the crop to supply the Chinese market and fill British coffers. In effect, the British empire became a narco-state, argues Amitav Ghosh in Smoke and Ashes, a propulsive and revelatory history of how opium, a tool of colonial capitalism, was used to pummel India, corrupt China and prop up empire.
The “hidden histories” of the book’s subtitle that Ghosh unearths are ugly indeed. “No amount of sophistry,” he writes, “can disguise the fact that the British empire’s opium racket was a criminal enterprise, utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.” Successor companies linked to that inglorious period include Shell, Billiton and Barings.
Ghosh, a prolific writer of historical fiction, became hooked on opium’s history while writing his Ibis trilogy, completed in 2015, of novels set in the run-up to the first opium war, triggered in 1839 and fought between Britain and China.
Smoke and Ashes, which opens hesitantly on the history of both tea and the opium poppy but finds a stronger voice as a catalogue of colonial rapaciousness, lands at a moment of deep reckoning with the past. As the writer Sathnam Sanghera has artfully analysed in Empireland and its sequel Empireworld, the complex legacies of colonialism are felt today beyond familiar company names. If you want to know why Mumbai is home to skyscraper-dwelling billionaires while eastern India languishes in relative poverty, then we need to travel with Ghosh back to the time when Europeans were ruling the waves, colonising distant lands, exploiting foreign peasants and becoming drug cartels.
Opium, long cultivated in modest quantities in Asia and the Middle East and used medicinally as a painkiller and sedative throughout human history, became a favoured diplomatic gift as the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish sought to cut deals and boost trade across the Indian Ocean. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch East India Company began using it as currency, exchanging the drug for pepper on the Malabar Coast. From Dutch-controlled Java, a particularly addictive version of the drug flowed eastward via Chinese merchants, prompting China to ban it.
Britain, meanwhile, was busy wresting control of Indian territories, among them the opium-producing northern region of Bihar. In 1772, Bihar’s opium production was placed under the control of the East India Company. It was a master stroke, cutting European rivals out of the picture just as Britain was running short of silver to pay the Chinese for their tea.
Despite China’s drug ban, Britain pushed to increase opium exports there by claiming it was continuing an indigenous trade practised by the Mughals. It shows, Ghosh writes, “the British empire’s remarkable talents in self-exculpatory myth-making . . . Not only did Western colonisers succeed in using opium to extract wealth from Asians but they were successful also in obscuring their own role in the trade by claiming it had existed since time immemorial because non-white people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity.”
By 1799, the company’s opium department — for whom George Orwell’s father later worked — wielded a cruel monopoly over more than a million Indian peasant farmer households, deciding how much opium each could plant and setting (low) prices for harvests. Uncompliant farmers faced violence and eviction; a network of spies outed growers suspected of selling to the black market. Interestingly, the British had a more hands-off approach to opium production in the Malwa region, charging only transit taxes on shipping from Bombay. Ghosh partly ascribes Mumbai’s current wealth to that early anomaly.
To skirt the bans, supplies were auctioned to private traders in Calcutta, who sold them on to Chinese smugglers. In 1839 China’s Qing rulers finally cracked down, impounding imports and triggering the first opium war. Britain’s victory haul comprised forced legalisation, Hong Kong and more generous access to Chinese consumers.
The British empire, it turned out, was as ruthlessly addicted to the drug money as the Chinese were to the drug itself; it accounted for up to a fifth of the British Raj’s revenues through much of the 19th century. The empire clung to its golden goose, even as anti-opium sentiment grew and grew in China, abroad and at home.
British doctors complained that, although valuable medicinally, “the habitual use of [opium] is productive of the most pernicious consequences”. Yet Indian spokesmen were wheeled out to justify British policies, saying that Indian farmers would starve if the trade stopped. These have become the cunning corporate tactics of today, Ghosh argues, as energy companies “allude [wrongly] to the need of the global poor as a reason why fossil fuel industries should continue to expand”.
While the government countered critics by claiming supply merely reflected demand, Ghosh reasonably contends that supply drove demand, by ensnaring more users. That mirrors Patrick Radden Keefe’s thesis in Empire of Pain, his epic 2021 investigation into how the Sackler family profited from a devastating opioid epidemic that it helped to create, and to which Ghosh often refers. Despite a second opium war in the 1850s, it would take until the early 20th century for the system to be dismantled.
The factory at Ghazipur still manufactures opium legally today. The trade itself lives on in illicit form, rooting itself in failed states and conflict zones such as Afghanistan; comprising opium, its derivatives, and synthetic versions such as fentanyl; and distributed by criminal networks beyond the reach of law enforcement.
Ghosh occasionally stumbles, according the opium poppy an unwarranted sense of agency as a player in world history. Even so, as a skilled storyteller, he triumphs in laying out the horrors of the British empire’s opium trade for all to see.
Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh, John Murray £22, 416 pages
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