Royal Commission on Opius


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Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia


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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.




Opium’s Long Shadow


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The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I. Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage. The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.




The Chinese and Opium under the Republic


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In the nineteenth century, opium smoking was common throughout China and regarded as a vice no different from any other: pleasurable, potentially dangerous, but not a threat to destroy the nation and the race, and often profitable to the state and individuals. Once Western concepts of addiction came to China in the twentieth century, however, opium came to be seen as a problem "worse than floods and wild beasts." In this book, Alan Baumler examines how Chinese reformers convinced the people and the state that eliminating opium was one of the crucial tasks facing the new Chinese nation. He analyzes the process by which the government borrowed international models of drug control and modern ideas of citizenship and combined them into a program that successfully transformed opium from a major part of China's political economy to an ordinary social problem.




Crusaders Against Opium


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Opium addiction in China during the closing decades of the Ch'ing dynasty afflicted all segments of society. From government officials to farmers, the population fell prey to the effects of the drug. Some provinces reported addiction rates as high as eighty percent. With the birth of Chinese nationalism, reformers—missionaries who had witnessed the effects of opium on Chinese society, students who had studied abroad and returned to their native land with broader perspectives, families who had lost all through the addiction of a loved one, doctors who had firsthand knowledge that opium use led only to death—cried out against the drug. Even though many were convinced that opium use had sapped the strength of China, ending the use of the drug was a complicated problem. Opium trade financed the colonial government of India, and imports amounted to many tons annually. Domestic poppies were also cultivated as source of income. Kathleen Lodwick examines the intersecting efforts of Protestant missionaries, particularly medical doctors, who had long denounced opium use, the British Royal Commission on Opium, which was decidedly pro-opium, the U.S. Philippine Commission, which denounced not only the trade but the Chinese people, and the British officials who finally undertook the task of ending the importation of opium to China. China kept few records on the amount of drug use or its effects. Missionary medical doctors conducted the first scientific survey on the effects of the drug, and their findings provided clear evidence of its perniciousness. Such evidence could not be ignored, whatever the fortunes involved, and missionaries conducted a campaign of education and awareness in China and abroad. As a result of their efforts, China and Britain entered into a treaty that called for all opium trade to cease by 1917, and both governments as well as the missionaries become immediately active toward that end. The suppression campaign was among the most successful of the late Ch'ing reforms. Lodwick tells a fascinating story of imperial exploitation and of a strain of honest crusaders who sought to right some of the wrongs their own nation was perpetrating. This book represents a strong argument against legalization of addictive drugs, a topic being discussed today in the United States as a solution to the societal problems our own drug use has caused.




The Sassoons


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A spectacular generational saga of the making (and undoing) of a family dynasty: the riveting untold story of the gilded Jewish Bagdadi Sassoons, who built a vast empire through global finance and trade—cotton, opium, shipping, banking—that reached across three continents and ultimately changed the destinies of nations. With full access to rare family photographs and archives. “Engaging...compelling...well-paced and supremely satisfying. ”—The New York Times They were one of the richest families in the world for two hundred years, from the 19th century to the 20th, and were known as ‘the Rothschilds of the East.’ Mesopotamian in origin, and for more than forty years the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Basra, they were forced to flee to Bushir on the Persian Gulf; David Sassoon and sons starting over with nothing, and beginning to trade in India in cotton and opium. The Sassoons soon were building textile mills and factories, and setting up branches in shipping in China, and expanding beyond, to Japan, and further west, to Paris and London. They became members of British parliament; were knighted; and owned and edited Britain’s leading newspapers, including The Sunday Times and The Observer. And in 1887, the exalted dynasty of Sassoon joined forces with the banking empire of Rothschild and were soon joined by marriage, fusing together two of the biggest Jewish commerce and banking families in the world. Against the monumental canvas of two centuries of the Ottoman Empire and the changing face of the Far East, across Europe and Great Britain during the time of its farthest reach, Joseph Sassoon gives us a riveting generational saga of the making of this magnificent family dynasty.




The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India


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Winner of the 2019 Michael Mitterauer-Prize for best monograph The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India is a pioneering work about the more than one million peasants who produced opium for the colonial state in nineteenth-century India. Based on a profound empirical analysis, Rolf Bauer not only shows that the peasants cultivated poppy against a substantial loss but he also reveals how they were coerced into the production of this drug. By dissecting the economic and social power relations on a local level, this study explains how a triangle of debt, the colonial state’s power and social dependencies in the village formed the coercive mechanisms that transformed the peasants into opium producers. The result is a book that adds to our understanding of peasant economies in a colonial context.




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