In 2008, Amitav Ghosh released A Sea of Poppies, the first in a trilogy of historical fiction set in India and China in the 1830s amid the outbreak of the First Opium War. The Ibis trilogy details the growth of opium in India, the role of British agents in shipping it to Canton (modern-day Guangzhou) and the massive international impact of the opium trade. Now, eight years after the final book in the trilogy was released, Ghosh has released Smoke and Ashes, a non-fiction compendium to the series, based on his extensive historical research conducted while writing the trilogy. The book is a mixture of a travelogue, a reflection on writing and research but mainly an expansive history of opium’s cultural and economic impact that takes us from the 18th century to the modern day.
As opium played a major part in the Ibis trilogy, Ghosh undertook extensive research to ground the novel in fact. This, as he writes, led him to learn about Chinese history for the first time, a history which in India is often solely fixated on the shameful 1962 defeat in the Sino-India war. This myopic focus on conflict obscures a far richer shared history between the two countries.
In the book, Ghosh talks about the worldwide history of opium use, both medically and recreationally, and the history of the trade. He explains the interplay between the East India Company (EIC) importing expensive Chinese tea and in return exporting a ready supply of Indian opium to China, which would make the EIC rich. While prior to the EIC there was domestic opium production in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, it was more like a cottage industry with limited domestic consumption. Only with colonialism did opium production and consumption in the sub-continent take off as a sizable industry. As he writes
Europeans did not, by any means, invent the opium trade. Rather, as with the traffic in human beings on the Atlantic Coast, they took a pre-existing, small scale practice and expanded it by orders of magnitude.
The EIC’s Opium Department was established in 1799 to oversee all aspects of opium production, from its growth to its journey to the auction house in Calcutta. By 1850, almost half a million acres in Bihar were dedicated to growing poppies and between 5-7 million laborers were involved in the production. Despite the immense wealth the trade generated, conditions for opium farmers were tough. After the land had been designated by the Opium Department for growing poppies, then no other crop could be planted on such land and farmers risked eviction for planting rice or other vegetables that would earn more than the meager amounts of offer for poppy farmers. The trade also had negative social impacts on the region as opium consumption reportedly grew 100 times in areas in Bihar where opium was grown. Ghosh also looks at the disparities and differences in how British and Indian writers and painters documented and remembered the trade. At the same time as Rudyard Kipling was writing neutrally about opium in the passive tense, in what Ghosh describes as a
an outstanding example of the way in which the English language was often used to occlude and naturalize colonial practises and policies,
his contemporary Rabindrath Tagore wrote that
in the Indo-China opium traffic, human nature itself sinks down to such a depth of despicable meanness, that it is hateful even to follow the story to its conclusion.
Ghosh explains how opium was a driver in Indian migration, both domestically and internationally and how diaspora groups in India such as Parsis, Armenians and Baghdadi Jews all played significant roles in trade that were disproportionate to their relatively small population. It also had an impact on regional businesses. For many Indian traders, their first experience with the China trade came through opium, giving them experience and connections to later engage in more legitimate trade between the two countries. It didn’t just provide the experience in international trade for local traders, but opium provided seed capital for many businesses and ventures across the region, not just in India and China but also businesses and trading houses in Java, and Singapore greatly benefited
The book isn’t limited to the EIC and India, as Ghosh covers the role of the Dutch who were driving an expansion of opium markets in modern-day Indonesia and fighting their own smaller opium wars with local rulers to quash their attempt at opium prohibition.
Though traditionally seen as trade primarily driven by British traders, Ghosh shows how businesses in the USA also benefited hugely from the trade,he also provides modern-day parallels and details on the current opioid epidemic in the USA and draws comparisons between the failure of the USA’s war on drugs and the attempts of China to eradicate opium use in the 19th century. The final section of the book talks about the modern opioid crisis and abuse of Oxycontin in the USA: in 2019, 30 million Americans were said to be addicted to opioids. Ghosh compares the role Big Pharma has had on weakening American medical institutions through
enlisting doctors and physicians in their distribution campaigns; their success in co-opting lawmakers at both the state and national level; and the fact that the company’s top management was able to get away with light sentences—all point to corruption on an outstanding scale.
Ghosh is then able to compare the effect that opium had on weakening Chinese institutions in the 19th century.
This is by no means a new story; indeed, countless books already exist that focus on the trade, consumption and wars of opium. Yet it is a highly readable, if sometimes eclectic book, with an analysis of modern-day opioid use providing a fresh lens to look back at the opium trade. Ghosh deftly uses opium as a lens to explore Indian and Chinese history and how the trade impacted Indo-Chinese relations.While the book is a vital companion piece to the Ibis trilogy it is also a stand-alone book in its own right.