CHAPTER ONE

THUNDERS BEFORE THE STORM

UNWIELDY OBJECTS LIKE the opium trade are not easily removed, even if their foundations shake and objections all around begin to mount. Understanding the size, weight, and economic significance of the opium trade that contributed to its force in international politics helps create the backdrop against which later opposition arose. Especially given the swiftness of opposition, let us remember that neither the trade under attack nor the politics that tried to absorb the shock could be taken lightly. The opium trade in Asia can be described in terms of two major shifts in the position of narcotic drugs in international society. The first attracted empires to the opium trade like flies to a flame. The second turned the flame against empires, leaving them with the black stains of a burnt reputation.
Before that happened, the first human traces of opium were not all that auspicious. Some four thousand years ago, opium was spotted in the southwest of Switzerland, close to Neuchùtel. Thirty-one hundred years ago, opium appeared in the Cueva de los Murciélagos, in the Spanish province of Córdoba. In the sixth century, long-distance trade brought it to the Tang dynasty, although nothing seemed to suggest that the palliative fueled the commercial appetites of the Arab traders for conquest, subjugation, or, in Chinese perceptions, an opium threat.1 For centuries to follow, opium did not yet become synonymous or synchronous with imperial expansion. As a commercial practice, the opium trade preceded the age of British-European imperialism without attracting the social or political controversy for which it is known today.
Around 1700, however, a mixture of tobacco and opium began spreading from the Mughal empire to Java, the East Indies, Taiwan, and especially Fujian Province, then part of the Qing empire.2 At the time, signs that a long imperial embrace of the opium trade would follow were still inchoate, just as its ties to colonial and imperial expansion were still tenuous. During the nineteenth century, Britain, France, and later the Netherlands and the United States as empires targeted Southeast Asia for revenues, territorial resources, and adventure. The opium trade offered satisfaction across all three domains. But before the opium wars brought Asian and British trading paradigms and practices head to head in a political clash, market competition revealed British ambitions on the rise. The British, however, started out from an initial position of inferiority vis-à-vis Asian opium traders. Despite the attractiveness of the opium trade, its complexity resisted the metaphor of a ready harvest. Before it could be harnessed as an investment opportunity of strategic proportions, opium’s political economy posed a managerial conundrum. Its internal, intra-Asian organization remained quite inscrutable to the British, French, and Dutch colonial administration up until the late nineteenth century, when they took hold of it across Asia.
But as the opium trade exposed the limited epistemic reach of imperial aspirants, some were determined to meet the challenge of incomprehension with early analytic footwork on the maritime coordination of opium and its regional market composition. The drug traversed rather erratically the formal divide between official and unregistered trade, vacillating as a source of revenue for both British official trading and Chinese smugglers. Caught in an interdependence that could neither be politically unacknowledged nor socially welcomed, British and Chinese opium traders became trading partners, ever since British captains ordered their Indian opium shipments in defiance of the Qing ban. Indian opium shipments were not offloaded directly onto Chinese territory but first offshore by Chinese “fast crab” boats to gigantic opium hulks, the floating warehouses plying the harbor. There, opium shipments were transferred to boats that brought them ashore for Chinese consumption.
The major turning point came in 1757, when the British East India Company (BEIC) received the opium monopoly from the government. This step precipitated international commercial recognition that an Asian opium market existed, seemingly open to those who were able to develop the logistics and infrastructure of long-distance trade. In South Asia, an increase in opium supplies fed the BEIC’s opium monopoly, testing the reliability of the British conduit to Chinese opium smokers.3 The opium trade spurred the rise of the BEIC, making it arguably the financially and territorially most powerful, non-Asian market force within Asia. By the early nineteenth century, the Gujarat coast was under BEIC control, enabling its administration of maritime exports from Malwa in the northwest to the Portuguese ports of Daman and Diu. Inter-imperial cooperation in the opium trade may have begun with the British-Portuguese experiment in prohibition by Marquis Wellesley and the Portuguese Viceroy of Goa, in exchange for British military defense assistance to Portugal against Napoleonic France.4 By the early nineteenth century, economic opium interests were prominent enough to be traded with military strategic gains in the domestic heartlands of empires. Within the triangular economy between soaring British demand for Chinese tea, paid for by Chinese silver, the BEIC moved opium auctions in Calcutta into the center of its efforts to regain a trade balance with the Qing. The tea that British traders carried from Guangzhou to India thus directly corresponded to the British return trade in opium to the Qing, parked offshore to be carried into the interior by Chinese opium smugglers. In a global perspective, the Latin American movements for independent statehood became a complicating external factor of risk by creating a shortage of silver exports. While Qing silver exports increased during its silver-copper coin crisis in the early decades of the nineteenth century, this came at a cost, with Qing opium imports serving as a substitute for former silver imports. The resulting Qing exposure to the Asian opium economy increasingly dominated by Britain was embedded in a global restructuring of commodity trades.5
Lest we understand the advance of the imperially sponsored opium trade as a purely commercial initiative absent any political valence, it is worth taking note of long-standing Asian regimes of opium prohibition prior to imperial claims of the Asian opium market. The BEIC role of expanding the Asian opium economy are by now well known. So is the Qing’s comprehensive commitment to opium control across the imperial domain, not only at coastal borders but also crucially at the continental frontiers in the West.6 But a cross-cutting perspective on less-known opium policies between present-day India and present-day China reveals a different face of opium proponents and opponents across the main region of opium transport between South Asia and East Asia. Bordering on the east coast of the Bay of Bengal and almost bordering the Qing dynasty, Siam, which corresponds to present-day Thailand, presents one window into the Asian opium economy and attempts to rein it in.7 Buddhist injunctions decreed anti-opium laws as early as 1360. Ayutthaya’s Law of the Three Seals (Kotmai Tra Sam Duang) subjected violators of the law to severe ostracism. For three days, opium consumers were paraded “around the city on land and on water,” imprisoned until presumed detoxification, then sent home on the condition that relatives proved willing to retrieve the culprits from jail. The family would monitor the abstinence of a former convict to enable life after crime. Tellingly, this state system of drug control put a high premium on the family, turning it into the strongest available constraint on social behavior short of prison.8
FIGURE 1.1. The first phase of opium consumption (English pamphlet).
Source: The Chinese Opium Smoker (London: S. W. Partridge & Co., ca 1880). Widener Library, Harvard University.
FIGURE 1.2. The first phase of opium consumption (Chinese pamphlet).
Source: Jie yan xing shi tu. Fuzhou: Min bei sheng shu hui yin fa, Guangxu 26 (1900). Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University.
But social law like this stopped at the water’s edge, and state control was never as easily asserted in the maritime realm off the coast. Siamese oversight of maritime opium distribution continued to pose a challenge, causing King Ramathibodi I to enact a ban in immediate response to Chinese opium traders, skilled in the opium trade since at least 1282. By the 1510s, opium traders had linked up with Siamese return voyages from Malacca, stepping up the influx of opium into the kingdom. The political capacity to keep the drug literally at bay showed its constraints early, with economic incentives holding the upper hand and state intervention struggling to keep up.
Deficient political controls illustrate how the superiority of economic stimuli over time encouraged supplies from more distant supply regions, leading to elongated trading routes and exacerbating the political dilemma of maritime interdiction. In 1511, after the Portuguese capture of Malacca, opium entered Siamese ports under Ayutthaya not only from Bengal but also from Arabia, as reported by sea captains and envoys to Duarte Barbosa, the brother-in-law and fellow circumnavigator of Ferdinand Magellan.9 With the Siamese state losing its grip, conflicts with the increasingly assertive presence of imperial commercial fleets sharpened. From the 1710s to the 1730s, Siamese maritime inspectors expressed frequent suspicion over Dutch opium trafficking, leading to confrontations between Siamese patrols and Dutch defense actions and finally the withdrawal of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from Siam in July 1740.
In Siamese-British relations, it probably did not help that the ship carrying the new British governor of Bengal in 1733 was exposed as a smuggler of opium.10 Tellingly, with the 1839 outbreak of the First Opium War between China, Siam’s close trading partner, and Britain, Siam’s long-term foe, the Siamese government promptly decided to step up opium prohibition to the highest level—to include the death penalty.11 In the 1840s, the Siamese government hired a British missionary, Dr. Dan Beach Bradley, to print nine thousand copies of the royal anti-opium edict, an unprecedented commitment to public anti-drug policy.12 More than a mere block to imperial market intrusions, Siamese prohibition reflected the personal duty, demanded by Buddhist codes, to cultivate the disciplined exercise of mental concentration. On the flip side, prohibition was part of the state’s concern with condemning delirium as mental and moral obstacles. Injunctions in the fifth precept and in the Mangala Sutta against fermented liquors and spirits were well established in Siam and other Southeast Asian settings with Buddhist characteristics, suggesting early social criticism of alcohol and narcotic consumption, centuries before the U.S. Christian version of temperance and prohibition achieved global fame.13
In continental Southeast Asia, Siam’s resistance was no secret to the British, despite subsequent disavowals of knowledge and responsibility regarding Siam’s preferred opium policies. Furthermore, Siam’s prohibition regime was not alone. Burma, its northern neighbor, made opium prohibition a top policy priority as well. As in Siam’s case, Burma’s opium prohibition responded directly to British commercial expansion. During the Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885) of what is today Burma and Myanmar, King Bodawpaya—an expansionist into the kingdoms of Arakan, Manipur, and Assam between 1784 and 1817—backed up the ban on intoxicant and stimulant consumption with the threat of capital offense, paralleling Siam. From both a political and a Buddhist religious perspective, these measures taken by states, although succeeded by anti-opium movements of the social reform type, bore conservative, authoritarian features during the first generations of interdictions.14 After Burma’s defeat by the British in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826), King Thibaw, the last of his dynasty, ordered the opium ban in 1880. The raison d’état of opium prohibition, however, was not to survive the collapse of the state itself. Burma’s unwilling presentation to Queen Victoria as a “New Year’s gift” in 1886 put an end to the project of prohibition, a gift presented by none other than Randolph Churchill, the future prime minister’s father.15 Economically, imperially motivated opium trading was too haphazard and punctuated by Asian counterefforts to earn the epithet of an opium strategy.
The First Anglo-Burmese War not only reversed political fortunes but also beckoned with profits for some. Asians participated in the trade, exemplified by prominent Parsi family enterprises, like that of Hormusji Bhicajee, whose ships offered a transport infrastructure even through the disruptions of the Anglo-Burmese clash. With at least equal vigor, other Parsi family enterprises had set their hopes on the China market as a mass consumer for Indian opium, even before the war. Leading Parsi merchants discovered the China market in the 1810s and 1820s, joining the widening participation in the Indian-Chinese opium trade that would become the economically and politically dominant supply route of Asia. Connections between the British and Indian opium trading were closely linked. Ships like the Ernaad and the Ternate were purchased by pioneering Parsi merchants from the BEIC, evidencing another facet of Asian capitalism before imperial capitalism.16 Many of Bombay’s Parsis shared their commercial success with the Hindu gentry of Calcutta.17 The lineages of local support for British imperial enterprises that had started with the financial backing of Hindu and Jain banking families for British armies gained maritime extensions in the decades preceding the First Opium War.
A glimpse into episodes of the burgeoning South Asian opium business offers a vivid illustration of opium’s significance as a social and political practice beyond h...