Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

The Dutch started this business, but the British East India Company displaced them in the 1760s. Its new monopoly on the opium trade in India resulted from a series of military victories in the Seven Years’ War and then in Bengal. Having requisitioned the ports and warehouses, the company forced the Indians to deliver opium at fixed prices. Edmund Burke accused it of depriving the natives ‘of their natural right of dealing with many competitors’. The head of the company, Warren Hastings, rejected the accusations. Later he was convicted of corruption, so Burke was probably right, but the opium monopoly continued. At the beginning of the nineteenth century opium was India’s largest export item and China’s largest import. It was also the second largest source of imperial revenue for British India after the land tax. 13

In Victorian England, opium was a common remedy. Taken with alcohol, it was believed to relieve pain, fever and melancholy. Containing 10 per cent opium, the mixture was called laudanum – an ancient alchemic word. Right up until the twentieth century British pharmacies sold laudanum over the counter. The smoking of opium was considered a Chinese speciality; in other cultures it was used differently – either boiled and inhaled or eaten in various mixtures. In nineteenth-century Europe opium smoking quickly caught on. Still, people considered it an oriental extravagance. Addicts were accused of lack of character and moral decadence. Europeans were also susceptible to addiction, but an epidemic on the scale of the Chinese one never happened elsewhere.

The British East India Company purchased opium as a standing crop, paying for it a year in advance. The business was on a gigantic scale: half a million Indian peasants grew poppy over an area of half a million hectares. The company did not allow the peasants to convert fields from poppy, even in years of hunger, allegedly for moral reasons. ‘It is not our mission to encourage the consumption of opium, but rather to lessen its use, or more properly speaking, the abuse of the drug, and for this end, as well as for the purpose of the revenue , to make the price to the public as high as possible,’ the directors of the company explained to the governor general of India in 1817. 14 But, in China, the company was facing threats from competitors. American ships transported opium from Turkey, but the company directors were even more concerned about the domestic production in China. The Chinese addiction to opium was strategically important for the balance of trade – the cherished value of the mercantile era. For centuries, Europe’s trade balance with Asia had remained negative. China did not need British wool or colonial goods such as sugar and tobacco. The deficit was covered by Spanish silver from the American colonies – up to half of this silver ended up in China. The rapid growth of tea imported from China changed this equilibrium; if the trade gap wasn’t covered, gold and silver would leave European treasuries. Opium from British India filled this gap.

Opium consumption in China spread rapidly, catching on in ports and mining towns. The Chinese authorities tried to protect the country by forbidding the use of opium. In 1799 Peking published the first decree that proclaimed opium a global evil and committed the bureaucracy to fight against it. This had little effect; the civil servants could hardly cope with their own addiction. During the nineteenth century the number of opium addicts in China reached 10 million; some estimates put the figure much higher – up to 10 per cent of the population, or 40 million people. The cities were filled with opium dens. Like the coffeehouses of the Enlightenment or the chocolate clubs of the Restoration, they became hubs of local culture where people shared news, did deals and made contacts. The informal and hedonistic character of these dens and clubs placed them in direct opposition to the Confucian state. This was the Chinese version of civil society. Living off their staple rice diet, peasant coolies could not buy opium. It was for people with money to spend – craftsmen, miners, gardeners and civil servants. As its use spread among the wealthy, opium dragged people down, creating a new poverty. It also spawned new crimes, unknown to traditional society, and new fortunes. This was a vicious circle, the nature of eviclass="underline" toxicity exacerbates inequality, which provokes a greater anomie, which increases the demand for drugs.