Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia

Regulating Consumption in British Burma

A. Wright

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137317605
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This study investigates the connections between opium policy and imperialism in Burma. It examines what influenced the imperial regime's opium policy decisions, such as racial ideologies, the necessity of articulating a convincing rationale for British governance, and Burma's position in multiple imperial and transnational networks.

1

The Fashioning of Colonial Opium Policy in Arakan and Tenasserim, 1826–1852

Although opium consumption has a long history in Burma, it is difficult to establish the specifics – by whom opium was consumed, in what context and how much – before the colonial era. Nonetheless, in order to better understand the development of the colonial opium industry this chapter briefly discusses opium consumption in pre-colonial Burma and outlines the British East India Company’s involvement in the Asian opium trade prior to the annexation of Arakan and Tenasserim in 1826. This chapter also sets opium consumption in Burma in a transnational context, briefly examining opium consumption and regulation elsewhere in Asia and establishing connections between regulation and consumption in India and China and in Burma which subsequent chapters will explore in greater detail. This chapter’s examination of British rule and opium administration in Arakan and Tenasserim introduces in nascent form several of the recurrent themes in this study: the connection between opium and labour, the recurrent question of the rationale for British drug policy and imperial rule and the importance of transnational networks in determining imperial drug policy. In order to understand the context of the colonial opium industry, it may be helpful to first sketch a very brief history of opium consumption, moving from the global history of opium to the local history of opium consumption in Burma.

Opium consumption in Burma before the colonial era

The opium poppy was probably the first plant cultivated for use as a drug: opium poppy fossils have been found in Neolithic settlements in Western Europe.¹ Consuming opium alleviates pain, suppresses coughing and dulls the sharp edges of consciousness: across times and places it has been used as an anaesthetic, an aphrodisiac, a social lubricant, in religious rituals to commune with the divine and to allow the tired worker to continue his or her labour. These different kinds of uses have often overlapped and as with other drugs, the line between “medicinal” and “recreational” consumption has often been ambiguous.

Arab traders probably first brought opium to East, South and Southeast Asia, and the expansion of Islam after the seventh century aided in the expansion of opium consumption.² For centuries Asian consumers crushed opium and ate it, or mixed it with liquid to drink it as a tincture: it wasn’t until after Europeans carried tobacco from the Americas to Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century that consumers, perhaps beginning with the Javanese, began to smoke it.³ Opium was produced and sold for export in Mughal India, and this opium, produced in the Patna region, found markets in maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, including Burma.

It seems that in pre-colonial Burma, as in Mughal India or Qing China, there were sporadic incidents of opium abuse among the elite.⁴ It also seems likely that opium was at least occasionally used as a painkiller, as colonial accounts describe it being used for this purpose by tattooists.⁵ But there is no evidence that opium consumption was ever widespread before the colonial era. Opium doesn’t seem to have been cultivated within the Burmese heartland, and it seems that cultivation in the border areas did not occur until the spread of opium cultivation in China in the mid eighteenth century. European travellers’ accounts contain sporadic references to opium consumption in Burma in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but this was foreign-produced opium. The first English traveller to visit Burma in the 1580s, Ralph Fitch, reported that there was a market for opium in Pegu. Describing trade between India and Pegu, Fitch wrote: “In India there are few commodities which serve for Pegu, except Opium of Cambaia, painted cloth of S. Thome, or of Masulipatan, and white cloth of Bengala, which is spent there in great quantity ….”⁶ Opium from farther afield also found a market in sixteenth century Pegu: Fitch wrote that to the port of Cirion in Pegu “come ships from Mecca with woollen cloth, Scarlets, Velvets, Opium, and such like”.⁷ When the Dutch East India Company began trading with Burma in the seventeenth century, they expected to find a market for opium.⁸

There is no reliable estimation of the volume of pre-colonial opium consumption in Burma. But since the drug was not produced locally, and instead was imported from India and the Middle East, it seems likely that its price would be sufficiently high to restrict its access to a relatively small segment of the population. In addition to the limitations that would have been imposed by cost, religious strictures may have helped prevent any widespread adoption of the opium habit. The fifth Buddhist precept was commonly interpreted to forbid the consumption of both alcohol and opium.⁹

It seems likely that the increased availability of the drug in China from the mid eighteenth century onwards would have increased consumption in Burma. Again, substantial evidence in Burmese sources for such an increase is lacking, but there is some anecdotal evidence to support this contention. Not long before the first Anglo-Burmese war, Henry Gouger was sent to Burma to scout out potential trade ventures.¹⁰ The Burmese authorities imprisoned him on suspicion of spying, following the outbreak of war. He describes an incident in which a slave was murdered in the prison, but in order to conceal the incident, the slave’s death was recorded in the prison register as caused by opium withdrawal.¹¹ This incident, if Gouger’s account is accurate, indicates that opium was available in the city, that use by slaves was not unknown and that there was sufficient familiarity with the concept of withdrawal resulting from addiction that it was considered a plausible explanation for an unexplained death.

To get some sense of the prevalence of opium use in pre-colonial Burmese society, comparing European travellers’ observations of Burmese opium and tobacco consumption is instructive. Tobacco seems to have been the drug of choice in colonial era Burma: men, women, and, according to some reports, children, smoked it, most often in the form of long cheroots. There are numerous accounts of Burmese tobacco use by European travellers: nearly every travel account written in English about Burma in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries refers to the universality of tobacco use among the Burmese. If opium, a drug that would have seemed more exotic to the European observer, had been used in similar quantities it would almost certainly be mentioned in these travel accounts, but mentions of opium use in Burma are comparatively sparse, and usually refer to use by Chinese or Shan consumers rather than by the ethnic Burmese population.¹² This is true even after the imposition of colonial rule increased the availability of opium in Burma. One European author contrasted the relative importance of opium and tobacco in Burma: “But if, in time, all chances of procuring cheap opium shall be taken away from him, the Burman, like the British soldier or sailor, will never exist without his loved tobacco. Man, woman and child must draw consolation from the seductive weed ….”¹³ Buddhist scripture did not censure tobacco use as it did alcohol and opium consumption, and tobacco smoking was common across all social classes. In contrast, opium was a drug that was prohibited by religion, did not have an established social context for its use, and historically had probably been mostly indulged in by the upper classes, and by populations on the periphery of Burma.

Opium and the East India Company to 1826

A brief history of the British East India Company’s involvement in the Indian opium industry provides useful context for the Company’s eventual expansion of their opium industry to their new divisions of Arakan and Tenasserim after 1826. From the time that Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar Coast in 1498, European merchants were motivated to find a trade good that would gain them entry into the lucrative Asian trading systems, and compensate for the drain of silver from west to east. Eventually opium would become that good, and from the seventeenth century onwards, European merchants helped expand the already established Asian opium trade.

Vasco da Gama’s arrival marked the start of a new era of maritime trade between Europe and Asia, as well as the start of a century of Portuguese dominance in the Indian Ocean – relative to the other European powers. But by the end of the sixteenth century Portugal had lost its position of ascendancy among the European powers in Asia, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, two northern European chartered trading companies wrestled for dominance of the prized Indian Ocean trade routes. By the 1650s, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC hereafter) had succeeded in pushing the English East India Company out of maritime Southeast Asia to a large extent. The VOC bought up opium produced in Bihar and west Bengal at Patna from Indian merchants, and transported it to Southeast Asia.

Exactly when opium arrived in India is unclear. There is also some disagreement as to how and by whom opium was produced and distributed in India before the British assumption of control over Bengal in 1765. David Owen refers to a Mughal opium monopoly that was established some time after the death of the Mughal emperor Akbar at the beginning of the seventeenth century.¹⁴ Carl Trocki states that a group of Patna merchants assumed a monopoly over opium purchase in Patna in the early eighteenth century twilight of Mughal power, in exchange for an annual payment.¹⁵ But M. Emdad-ul Haq asserts that the existence of a Mughal opium monopoly that predated the British presence in Bengal was a convenient fabrication of nineteenth century colonial historians, citing the lack of any mention of an opium monopoly in the account of Akbar’s administration found in the Ain-IAbkari.¹⁶ Historians also disagree as to the circumstances of opium production, and in particular to what extent opium production was coerced.

The English East India Company (EIC hereafter) was relatively slow to join in this trade, making its first shipment of opium in 1708. While the VOC was building a trading empire in Southeast Asia, the EIC had been profiting from the slow disintegration of the Mughal empire to expand its influence in India. The pivotal event for British ascendancy in India, and for the Indian opium industry, was the capture of the rich (and opium producing) province of Bengal. For the next decade or so after their assumption of administrative control over the province of 1765, the Company worked to exclude all other competitors from dealing in opium.¹⁷ Until Warren Hastings’ overhaul, the EIC’s Patna and Ghazipur councils did their best to control the Bengal opium industry with an eye to their own profit.¹⁸ When Hastings was made governor of Bengal in 1772, he set out to reform the opium industry as well as the rest of the Company’s corrupt and inefficient administration, creating a contract system according to which opium monopoly rights were sold annually.¹⁹ The opium produced by peasant cultivators was then sold at auction to private merchants who brought it to China and Southeast Asia.²⁰

In 1797, after the contract system proved to be prone to abuse – cultivators were being forced to sell their opium at less than production price, and opium was frequently adulterated – an agency system was instituted.²¹ The opium production that the East India Company controlled, and that was regulated by the agency system was grown in the northwest region of India, and was one of two types – “Patna” opium, which was grown in Behar, and “Benares” opium, which was grown in the northwest provinces. However, the opium poppy was also cultivated in west and central India, areas that were not under EIC control.²²

Having seen the success of the trade in Patna and Benares opium, local cultivators and merchants in Malwa and western India increased their own production of opium to sell to the profitable Southeast Asian and Chinese markets. This third variety of opium was known as “Malwa” opium. The East India Company was not pleased by the rise of a competitor. However, the Company did not have political control over the areas in which the opium was grown. After trying various measures to suppress this trade, and eliminate the competition overseas, the Company decided that the best way of reducing competition, and deriving a profit from this opium, was to charge a pass duty on all opium that left the country through Bombay. This was the most convenient port from which to export opium, and the pass duties were kept low enough to encourage producers of Malwa opium to participate in this system.²³ Some of the Malwa opium that reached Bombay was retained for excise use, to be sold within India.²⁴

Opium to China

British officials in Arakan and Tenasserim would look to Bengal for a model when it came to administering opium sales in their new territories, and subsequent chapters will outline some of the other ways that opium policy in Burma was influenced by the close connection between Burma and India. Connections to China, however, were arguably even more important in determining the course of Burmese opium policy. The Indo-Chinese opium trade always overshadowed opium sales to Burma, to the British officials who attempted to organise the Indian opium industry and British opponents of that industry alike.

Firstly, the profitability of the Chinese portion of Indian opium exports helped drive the expansion and ensure the continuation of Britain’s imperial opium industry, thus enabling imperial opium sales in Burma. By the time the East India Company annexed Arakan and Tenasserim, the Indo-Chinese opium trade was well established.²⁵ Opium exports from British India seemed to solve the problem of a trade imbalance between Britain and China. To eighteenth century British merchants, China was the greatest potential market in Asia – a market that was largely uninterested in British manufactures. However, the combination of Chinese tea and sugar from the Caribbean proved to be irresistible to British consumers, creating a seemingly insatiable demand for Chinese tea. The EIC was granted permission to establish a factory at Canton in 1716, and by the mid eighteenth century large amounts of tea were exported each year from Canton to Britain. At first, the tea trade created a trade deficit for Britain that could not be compensated for by the tepid Chinese interest in British manufactures. But after the EIC’s conquest of Bengal, the trickle of Indian opium that had flowed to China for hundreds of years would become a torrent, as opium proved to be the elusive trade good that corrected the flow of silver in the favour of the British. At the time when the East India Company collided with the Kingdom of Ava, the volume of opium moving from India to China was rapidly increasing, and China had become the most profitable market for the opium produc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Fashioning of Colonial Opium Policy in Arakan and Tenasserim, 1826–1852
• 2 Regulating Opium in British Burma, 1852–1885: Addiction, Ethnicity and Revenue
• 3 “Lady Britannia, her Children, her Step-Children and her Neighbours”: Race and the Regulation of Consumption in Colonial Burma, c.1890
• 4 Burma as a “Special Case”: Testimony about Burma at the Royal Commission on Opium of 1893–1895
• 5 Opium and the Maintenance of Imperial Rule: The Royal Commission on Opium and the Rationale for British Opium Policy in Burma
• 6 The Expansion of the Opium Industry in Burma, and the Beginning of the Age of International Conferences, 1895–1914
• 7 Burma, the League of Nations and Transnational Opium Policy Networks
• 8 Separation, Negotiation and Drug Diplomacy: 1935–1939
• Epilogue
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index