Are you mad right now? Want to feel more mad? Good! Step right up. Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction book about the opium trade, which he researched while writing his historic fiction Ibis trilogy, is a doozy.
The Portuguese Catherine of Braganza married Charles II and became the queen of England in the late 1600s. She is widely credited with popularizing tea drinking in England, and by the 1700s, it was a huge British import from China, mostly thanks to the East India Company. All China wanted in return was silver, which Europe was mining (often with indigenous labor) through their colonial presence in the Americas. Faced with dwindling silver reserves, the East India Company had the brilliant idea to start selling Indian opium in earnest to China, even though this was illegal in China. In short, the East India Company forced many Indian farmers to grow opium (a hugely exploitative practice which actually often lost them money and had socioeconomic implications which persist even today) so that they could smuggle it into China. When Chinese authorities destroyed a huge amount of imported opium, England started a war (well, two wars) with China, forcing the country to pay reparations (!) and legalize the sale of opium.
This book will certainly leave you disgusted with England, and the Dutch and United States aren’t spared, either. Many a Boston Brahmin family (and many a familiar name) got a huge boost from their young men spending a few swashbuckling years as, well, basically state-sanctioned drug dealers. Ghosh deftly weaves the story of the historic opium trade with that of the modern practices of companies such as Purdue, of Sackler infamy.
Like all of Ghosh’s nonfiction, “Smoke and Ashes” will broaden your mind and make you want to know more (if the book survives being thrown across the room a bunch of times in multiple fits of rage–maybe throw your own copy and not a library book).
