Suppressed history: Opium Inc

Opium Inc, written by Thomas Manuel, published by Harper Collins piblications is priced at Rs.599. The book is an The Crown, Indian farmers, merchants, ship-builders and sepoys were heavily involved in the opium trade forcibly imposed on imperial China It’s a matter of speculation whether the intractable issue of demarcation of the 484-km Sino-Indian border which stretches from Kashmir all the way down to Arunachal Pradesh in the north-east, is connected with a strong, ineradicable memory of the opium wars of the 19th century which Chinese historians unanimously describe as its century of humiliation. The plain truth is that although the subcontinent was under the rule of the East India Company and later the Crown, Indian farmers, merchants, ship-builders, and sepoys and police were heavily involved with the opium trade forcibly imposed upon imperial China. In this fascinating history of British India’s opium trade with imperial China, then the world’s wealthiest and most prosperous country — a dominant status that the 100 million-strong Communist Party of China (CCP) is determined to re-establish — Thomas Manuel, modestly described as a journalist and playwright, but a historian par excellence, skilfully connects the triangular opium trade between Great Britain, India and China which resulted in two opium wars, to the discovery of camellia sinensis (aka tea), the cup that refreshes but does not inebriate, in 17th century England. When Catherine Braganza, the neglected consort of King Charles I, made the fragrant beverage the most fashionable drink in the country, the demand for tea then grown only in China “became a national obsession”. But as Manuel recounts, while tea imports into Britain soared, “the Chinese had no particular interest in British manufactures or cloth that could balance the (trade) equation”. China’s Qing dynasty emperor “would accept only silver, the equivalent of cold hard cash”. Therefore, the Brits had to “find something the Chinese wanted and as much as they, the British, wanted tea”. That something was opium, the sticky gum harvested from the poppy plant. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the East India Co and later the British Raj, transformed the prosperous agriculture economies of Bengal and Bihar into “opium producing machines”. And for almost two centuries, they forcibly dumped huge quantities of this addictive narcotic in China, with devastating effect upon the hapless Chinese masses, to earn the silver for importing tea into Britain and colonies of the Empire, explains Manuel. This highly profitable drug trade made the East India Company fabulously rich and built the fortunes of numerous company officials and shareholders who flooded English banks with deposits which funded the Industrial Revolution and the British conquest of India. But in the process, the flourishing farm economies of fertile Bengal and Bihar were transformed into monoculture opium producing geographies, ruining their soil and mixed farming cultures, from which they have never recovered. Alarmed by the soaring number of people wrecked by opium addiction, in 1729 imperial China banned the import and use of the narcotic in the country. Undettered, the East…