Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

The irony was that Chinese entrepreneurs were now ousting India from the opium market. The British could not resist this development. Opium was grown mainly in the interior provinces of China, but the British controlled only the coastal territories. Opium opened up the interior provinces for domestic trade: more opium was shipped throughout China than salt or rice, which were consumed locally. Prices fell, demand grew, and internal production grew too. Opium and tea supplanted cereals; later, this became one of the causes of mass famine. By the end of the nineteenth century China was already producing nine times more opium than India. But, unlike India, China grew poppy entirely for domestic consumption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, opium became China’s internal affair: the country consumed 95 per cent of the global production of opium, and it was nearly all home-grown. This was the Chinese version of the Great Transformation: the peasants worked in the fields, growing opium for wages paid in opium, which was consumed on the spot. Sugar opened markets for global trade; opium closed them.

Deprived of their revenue, the British opened up new markets for opium throughout South-East Asia. Free-trade ports trans-shipped opium on two oceans; for many years Canton had been such a port, and Singapore had similar beginnings. In the 1840s Hong Kong, now a British colony, became the main trans-shipping port. Many Asian economic tigers owe their origins to opium, and only Japan resisted it. From the outset of talks with the Europeans in 1854, Japan stipulated a ban on the opium trade as a condition for the partial opening of its markets. At the beginning of the twentieth century the very same states which had made money out of the opium trade now curtailed it. In 1906 China concluded an agreement with Great Britain, committing both sides to reducing opium production. Peking undertook several confiscations, but in 1912 the Qing dynasty fell and with it the Confucian state. In 1909 the British authorities abolished the opium trade in Singapore. But they outlawed the opium trade throughout the empire only in 1943, when practically the whole of the British Empire east of Bengal was under Japanese control. Between the two world wars, both Chinese states – the communist insurgents and the Kuomintang regime – actively traded opium. After 1950 totalitarian China removed poppies from its fields and opium from the life of its subjects. But, in Europe, public opinion didn’t react to the opium trade in the same way that it had reacted to the slave trade; preconceptions about Orientalism, closely bound up with opium, played their role. To those who believed that opium was a ‘vice of the yellow race’, it didn’t seem particularly sinful to make money out of it. In fact, the opposite causality was in action, the same that had earlier worked with slaves and would later work with oiclass="underline" those who benefited from the opium trade blamed the victims in order to justify their own deeds.

Colonies and calories

The intensification of agricultural labour led to its convergence with urban labour and, therefore, to the destruction of the peasant way of life, with its notorious ‘idleness’. Dispersed among countless rural cottages, the English textile industry was so cost-effective that it led to the collapse of its more technologically advanced Italian rivals. A crucial question is what exactly led the rural households out of the equilibrium of the moral economy and diverted them onto the highway of pre-industrial capitalism.

The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm identified one of the reasons as the appearance in rural households of colonial goods such as sugar, tobacco, coffee and tea. 17 Producing a quasi-narcotic dependency, these products motivated people to earn more than the minimum needed for survival. The more affordable they were, the bigger the role they played in family budgets. We are talking about a mass phenomenon: after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and then for decades after that, these goods made up a quarter of all British imports. Trade in addictive commodities made English merchants fabulously rich. This trade channelled Britain’s colonial appropriations into the financial expansion of its markets, banks and stocks. But the sugar dependence of the metropolitan population was even more important for the empire.