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BOOK CORNER: ‘OPIUM INC. … How a Global Drug Trade Funded the British Empire by Thomas Manuel

January 29, 2023Uncategorizedbengal, bihar, bombay, britain, british empire, canton, chatham square, china, china town, colonization, colony, cotton, east india company, guanzhou, hong merchant, jejeebhoy, kamlesh tripathi, lin zexu, malwa, new york, opium, opium inc., pan zhencheng, sasson, shravancharitymission, sugar, tan chung, tea, Thomas Manuelshravancharitymission

Book Review: ‘OPIUM INC. … How a Global Drug Trade Funded the British Empire’ by Thomas Manuel.

The subject book brings to us the story of the world’s biggest drug deal ever, first published in India in 2021 by Harper Collins. It wouldn’t be out of context to mention at the very outset that the author must have researched to the hilt, digging deep into various historical texts, available, on the global opium supply chain and opium trade, before he penned the book.

Author Thomas Manuel is a journalist. He is also an award-winning playwright whose work revolves around history, science, education, or the intersection of all three. His words can be found in Lapham’s Quarterly, Nib, Wire and The Hindu, among other publications. In 2016, he won The Hindu Playwright Award for his play Hamlet and Angad. He currently works at India Ink, a public history project where he makes videos about how the past continues to affect the world today.

Contents: It starts with the Prologue: The Great Opium Triangle. The book is divided into eleven chapters. I would briefly take you through all of them without being a spoiler. It starts with the ‘Poppy Pioneers’ and then talks of how the opium trade flourished and travelled ‘From Calcutta to Canton’ in China. Canton is also known as Guanzhou. It was captured by the British during the first Opium War. This is followed by the ‘Smugglers of Malwa.’ Then there is also ‘The Bombay Boom’ that comes with the opium money. One of the book’s most interesting sections is ‘The Opium Wars’ which gave rise to ‘Anti-Opium Crusaders.’ The narration also takes you through ‘Opium and Independence’, its ‘Endings and Legacies’. One of the prominent chapters of the book is about the spread of ‘Opium, Cotton, Sugar and slavery’, followed by ‘Opium Smoke and Mirrors’ and it ends with ‘Opium Today’. This is followed by the Index and then a half-page on the author. The language of the author is plain English which is easy to comprehend but is garnished with a plethora of quotes from various texts that make up for a large part of the plot.

What the book offers: This is the story of the world’s biggest drug dealers. In the 19th century, the British East India Company operated a triangle of trade that straddled the globe, running from India to China to Britain. From India to China they took opium. From China to Britain they took tea. From Britain to India, they brought the British Empire. To paraphrase the historian Tan Chung: The Chinese got opium, the British got tea, and the Indians got colonialism. It was a machination that belied what was really going on: The British were enabling the longest-running drug deal ever in the history of the world. It was a devious plan that worked with cheap Indian land and labour and spun money for them. This is the story about the banality of evil, the birth of mega-corporations and the world’s first narco-state. The British had two problems, though. They were importing enormous amounts of tea from China, but the Celestial Empire (China) looked down on British goods and only wanted silver in return. Simultaneously, the expanding colony in India was proving far too expensive to maintain. The British solved both problems with opium, which became the source of income on which they built their empire. For more than a century, the British knew that the drug was dangerous but continued to trade in it anyway and today they talk of morality. They put their colony to work to produce something that the Chinese would buy even if they didn’t want it and that was opium. Over the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the British transformed the entire farming economies in Bengal and Bihar into opium-producing zones. And their agents smuggled the drug illegally into China, exchanging it for tea. Suddenly, the balance of trade leaned the other way. Silver started flowing back, out of China and into the British hands. Slowly this new equation solidified into a stable mechanism: The Great Opium Triangle. The story of the opium trade is not just about the narcotics that were stored in chests and packed in ships. It was also about how that trade shaped the world we live in today. It left an undying legacy in India, whether it was Bihar’s poverty or the affluence of Bombay, the story of opium is one of immense pain for many and huge privileges for a few.

My take on the book: If you haven’t read about opium you wouldn’t know what havoc it created and continues to create in the world. Opium Inc. sensitises you towards that. While reading the book one gets a feeling as if the author has collated the data from various texts and churned it into a book. In a span of 252 pages, he has plugged around 350 notations from various documents of various authors that go to show the extent of his extensive fact-finding. Every chapter is summarised in the preface itself in a few sentences which creates that initial enamour to run through the book. It has plenty of inside stories and anecdotes some hitherto unheard of. The detailing of how opium was processed in those times is enumerated quite well. From the opium seed to the market, the narration is comprehensive. How the opium markets in China operated is explained substantially well that many would not know. The description of Hong Merchant Pan Zhencheng in the chapter from Calcutta to Canton is engrossing. The book gets interestingly descriptive in the middle. The chapter ‘Smugglers from Malwa’ is elaborate on opium farming, its production and its trading. This is a book with a lot of yarn which otherwise for an average reader would be difficult to ferret out.

The author must have spent an aeon reading and collecting relevant data for the title. Information such as the first clipper in India was built in the 19th century in Howrah was a treat to read, even when, it was an opium clipper. The history of Bombay (Mumbai) is well carved out with its opium past and so are the daring stories of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy and Sasson who flourished there.

We all talk of contract farming today. The cultivation of opium under ‘contract farming’ started way before it came to other crops in the opium-growing areas. The author has also covered the story of Lin Zexu a high Chinese official best known for his role in the ‘First Opium War’ in whose honour a statue has been erected in Chatham Square in China Town, New York. The book proclaims that the opium wars were akin to the lethal world wars. After page 136 the pace of narration slows down a bit as it is loaded with minute details and names which are difficult to remember. There is one story after another and episode after episode. The narration covers the long history of sugar, opium, tea and cotton in a triangular context—India, China and Great Britain in elaborate detail. It gives a scheming view of the cross-ocean business mercantile.

What the book delivers: The real success of any book is how it impacts you after you’ve read it, and more so, do you feel knowledge-rich after reading it? Well, on those accounts the book is sterling. It tells you how the British demolished Asia. The narration transcends from opium to sugar to cotton under the umbrella of The East India Company. It touches upon most writers who consumed opium or have written on opium and it also includes all those languishing documents on opium. There are some rare pictures too in the book on the manufacturing of opium such as—The Mixing Room, The stacking room, The Examining Hall at the Opium Factory, Patna, 1850; and the Opium Fleet on the Ganges, 1850.

It breezes past romantic poets who were opium users and quotes the lines of a few. The book spans from the historical past of opium to the present. A line from the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge sums up all too well. It goes as follows:

Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

But whether the ‘milk of Paradise’ that climaxes the lines of Coleridge is opium isn’t clear. But it’s true that Coleridge consumed opium regularly. I would give the book a high rating. It definitely enhances your knowledge base when it comes to opium, tea, cotton and the triangle connecting India, China and the British Crown through The East India Company.

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By Kamlesh Tripathi

https://kamleshsujata.wordpress.com

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INTERESTING FACTS EPISODE 4: James Joyce, Captain Cook, Lenape Tribe, Lin Zexu and The tale of Genji

December 29, 2022Uncategorizedamerican, australia, british, canada, captain cook, chinatown, delaware, facts, general knowledge, gk, hikaru genji, ireland, irish government, james joyce, kamlesh tripathi, lenape, lin zexu, manhattan, melbourne, murasaki shikibu, ontario, qing dynasty, shravan charity mission, the tale of genji, wisconsin, zurichshravancharitymission

Why did the Irish government decline repatriation of James Joyce’s mortal remains to Ireland? Were they communal? Or were they greedy?

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. On 11 January 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zürich for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He fell into a coma the following day. He awoke at 2 am on 13 January 1941 and asked a nurse to call his wife and son. They were en route when he died 15 minutes later, less than a month before his 59th birthday.

His body was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery in Zürich. Swiss tenor Max Meili sang “Addio terra, addio cielo” Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the burial service. Joyce had been a subject of the United Kingdom all his life yet only the British consul attended the funeral. Although two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, neither attended Joyce’s funeral. When Joseph Walshe, a secretary at the Department of External Affairs in Dublin (capital of Ireland), was informed of Joyce’s death by Frank Cremins, charge d’affaires at Bern (Switzerland), Walshe responded, “Please wire details of Joyce’s death. If possible find out did he die a Catholic? Express sympathy with Mrs Joyce and explain my inability to attend the funeral.” Buried originally in an ordinary grave, Joyce was moved in 1966 to a more prominent “honour grave”, with a seated portrait statue by American artist Milton Hebald nearby. Nora, whom he had married in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried by his side, as is their son Giorgio, who died in 1976.

After Joyce’s death, the Irish government declined Nora’s request to permit the repatriation of Joyce’s physical remains, despite being persistently lobbied by the American diplomat John J. Slocum. In October 2019, a motion was put to the Dublin City Council to plan and budget for the costs of the exhumations and reburials of Joyce and his family somewhere in Dublin, subject to his family’s wishes. The proposal immediately became controversial, with the Irish Times commenting: ” … it is hard not to suspect that there is a calculating, even mercantile, aspect to contemporary Ireland’s relationship to its great writers, whom we are often more keen to ‘celebrate’, and if possible monetise, than read”.

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CAPTAIN COOK IS ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN NAMES IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY. But public feelings about Cook are divided. Cook only spent about 40 days on Australian shores in two brief visits in 1770 and 1773. However, he and his crew carefully examined the coast and waters, collecting detailed information for the British Empire about the economic potential of the land and how future ships could navigate the coast. Cook and his crew were the forerunners of the British colonisation of Australia, and centuries of British influence in the pacific more broadly.

A wealthy Melburnian purchased cook’s cottage for the city in 1934, to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the colonisation of Victoria. The cottage is just one of the many hundreds of public monuments commemorating Cook that have been sponsored by governments or citizens of influence. However, members of the public have registered a different perspective on Cook’s legacy by vandalising such moments and using them as a rallying point. This has generated debate over how Cook and his legacy should be dealt with by officialdom and represented to the public.’

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The Lenape also called the Leni Lenape, Lenni Lenape and Delaware people, are the indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands that include the Native American tribes, who live in the United States and Canada. Their historical territory included present-day northeastern Delaware, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania along the Delaware River watershed, New York City, western Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley. Today, Lenape people belong to the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma; the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin; the Munsee-Delaware Nation, Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and Delaware of Six Nations in Ontario.

The Lenape have a matrilineal (tracing of kinship through the female line) clan system but historically they were matrilocal (the societal system in which a married couple resides with or near the wife’s parents).

During the last decades of the 18th century, most Lenapes were removed from their homeland by expanding European colonies. The divisions and troubles of the American Revolutionary War and the United States independence pushed them farther west. In the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma and surrounding territory) under the Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape now reside in Oklahoma, with some other communities in Wisconsin and Ontario.

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Statue of Lin Zexu: The bronze statue of Confucius has dominated the landscape in Manhattan’s Chinatown since 1984, casting a learned and paternal look towards Mott Street, the World Trade Center and the world beyond. But Confucius has company now. A statue of a Qing Dynasty official from Fujian Province has been placed there now. The new statue is of Lin Zexu, who helped to ignite the Opium War by banning the drug, to the chagrin of British officials. Those who brought the Lin statue to Chatham Square say they did so to deliver a strong anti-drug message.

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The Tale of Genji: Written 1,000 years ago, the Japanese epic The Tale of Genji is often called the world’s first novel. Following the life and romances of Hikaru Genji, it was written by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting in the early eleventh-century imperial court, and often referred to as the world’s first psychological novel, the tale recounts the amorous escapades of the “Shining Prince” Genji and introduces some of the most iconic female characters in the history of Japanese literature.

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