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Suppressed OPIUM INC: HOW A GLOBAL the company established
a lucrative business
history DRUG TRADE FUNDED THE purchasing poppy seed
BRITISH EMPIRE
Thomas Manuel from officially appointed
z amindars who paid cap-
T’S A MATTER OF Harper Collins tive farmers rock-bottom
speculation whether the Rs.599; Pages 288 prices. The produce was
Iintractable issue of de- processed and packed in
marcation of the 484-km the company’s factories
Sino-Indian border which in Bengal and Bihar, and
stretches from Kashmir all When Catherine The Crown, Indian auctioned to “chummy
the way down to Arunachal Braganza, the neglected farmers, merchants, millionaires” in Calcutta
Pradesh in the north-east, consort of King Charles I, ship-builders and who financed shipping
is connected with a strong, made the fragrant bever- sepoys were heavily expeditions to Canton.
ineradicable memory of age the most fashionable involved in the opium The vast profits earned
the opium wars of the 19th drink in the country, the trade forcibly imposed by Calcutta’s mercantile
century which Chinese demand for tea then grown on imperial China community prompted
historians unanimously only in China “became a enterprising Indian traders
describe as its century of national obsession”. But in Bombay to start cultiva-
humiliation. The plain as Manuel recounts, while This highly profitable tion of poppy in the Malwa
truth is that although the tea imports into Britain drug trade made the East region ruled by Maratha
subcontinent was under soared, “the Chinese had India Company fabulously confederacy chieftains.
the rule of the East India no particular interest in rich and built the fortunes In the third chapter of
Company and later the British manufactures or of numerous company this engrossing history,
Crown, Indian farmers, cloth that could balance officials and sharehold- Manuel traces the rise of
merchants, ship-builders, the (trade) equation”. Chi- ers who flooded English Bombay into the country’s
and sepoys and police na’s Qing dynasty emperor banks with deposits which commercial capital to the
were heavily involved with “would accept only silver, funded the Industrial opium trade. Inspired by
the opium trade forcibly the equivalent of cold hard Revolution and the British the success of Calcutta’s
imposed upon imperial cash”. Therefore, the Brits conquest of India. But in mercantilism, they began
China. had to “find something the process, the flourishing running shiploads with
In this fascinating the Chinese wanted and as farm economies of fertile “higher potency” opium to
history of British India’s much as they, the British, Bengal and Bihar were Canton. In a chapter titled
opium trade with imperial wanted tea”. transformed into mono- the Bombay Boom, Manuel
China, then the world’s That something was culture opium producing details the huge profits
wealthiest and most pros- opium, the sticky gum geographies, ruining their made by Sir Jamsetjee
perous country — a domi- harvested from the poppy soil and mixed farming Jeejeebhoy who partnered
nant status that the 100 plant. During the 18th and cultures, from which they with the Hong Kong-based
million-strong Communist 19th centuries, the East have never recovered. firm Jardine Matheson
Party of China (CCP) is India Co and later the Alarmed by the soaring and Bombay’s Jewish Sas-
determined to re-estab- British Raj, transformed number of people wrecked soon family, whose chari-
lish — Thomas Manuel, the prosperous agriculture by opium addiction, in table institutions remain
modestly described as a economies of Bengal and 1729 imperial China landmarks of India’s urb s
journalist and playwright, Bihar into “opium produc- banned the import and p rima indis.
but a historian par excel- ing machines”. And for use of the narcotic in the With opium dens and
lence, skilfully connects almost two centuries, they country. Undettered, the addicts multiplying expo-
the triangular opium trade forcibly dumped huge East India Co’s agents in nentially in China where
between Great Britain, quantities of this addictive Calcutta smuggled the an estimated 20 percent of
India and China which narcotic in China, with drug on private ships to the population had become
resulted in two opium devastating effect upon the merchants in Canton, who addicted to the drug by
wars, to the discovery of hapless Chinese masses, to bribed government offi- the mid-19th century, the
c amellia sinensis (aka tea), earn the silver for import- cials to look the other way, Peking-based emperor or-
the cup that refreshes but ing tea into Britain and as huge cargoes of opium dered a severe crackdown
does not inebriate, in 17th colonies of the Empire, flooded the country. on this illegal trade. Large
century England. explains Manuel. Meanwhile in Calcutta, cargoes of opium were

86 EDUCATIONWORLD JUNE 2022