Book Review: Opium Empire  
Posted by Somnibus -- October 28, 2000
"Opium, Opium, Opium
Most Beautiful Flower
Bane and boon to man and societies.
You have seduced men and nations
By your beauty."
Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy
Written by: Carl H. Trocki
 Carl Trocki has given us a well-written and documented historical treatise in this book. He has reexamined the British-Indian opium trade to China and Southeast Asia to show the role that opium has had in the economic and administrative foundation for European Colonial structure in Asia. From his research, it appears there would have been no empire without opium.
Mr. Trocki uses a metaphorical contrast of Joseph Condrad's Lord Jim to make his point. In the same manner that Conrad's character abandoned Muslim pilgrims in a drifting ship to their doom, he sees the "Patna opium" as depriving the people of Southeast Asia of their sense of duty and morality, thus leading to their doom.
According to Trocki's belief, the Opium Trade prepared the ground for capitalism by creating mass markets, while destroying the morality of the political elite and society throughout Asia. Opium was the financial element that financed every Asian State structure from the last of the 18th century until the early 20th century. It provided the necessary means for empirical growth.
While Trocki shows in this book that opium usage and its affects have been around from early civilization, there has been no documented drug plague and opium addiction until China was struck down in the 18th and 19th centuries. This fact is most likely due to the development of chandu (smokable opium) not mixed with tobacco that played such a devastating part in China's decline. Though the world has always had its intoxicating and its addictive substances, there has been no documented proof of an epidemic until this time.
For most of the 19th century, the sole commercial advantage the Europeans had over the Chinese, both in South East Asia and in China itself, was opium. The production of opium was the predominate factor in the struggle for empirical powers. Peasants were often coerced into producing the opium that enabled the empire to flourish. Even in years of famine, farmers were often made to give up their grain cultivation in favor of producing the drug. To produce a 1.6kg. ball of raw opium today requires 387 man-hours; so one can see the value of peasant labor in the opium industry in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
To quote Mr. Trocki, "we need to see drugs as among the most powerful of social or cultural substances. It is true that some people are drug addicts, but others are equally addicted: some to profits of drug trade, still others to the moral superiority gained from condemning drug use by others, and finally some cannot live without the political and social power gained over society through the mechanisms of controlling drug use."
Mr. Trocki believes that there have not been enough unbiased studies done concerning opium, and that too much negative propaganda has been published concerning it. The reader will find this book both informative and interesting reading as he/she discovers the influence that opium has had on our world structure.
Purchase This Book Online -- At The Poppies.org Bookstore
Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy
Softcover Version
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