an inner barrier that has been implanted in the minds of not just Indians but also Americans, Europeans and many other people across the world, through certain patterns of global history.

because of what it tells us about the ways in which the world is perceived and understood.

the 1962 war was to some extent a consequence of the cultural and political shadows cast by the Himalaya—misreadings, misjudgements and faulty understandings played no small part in triggering the conflict. 4

The extreme rancour against China that is now increasingly evident in the United States has existed in India for most of my life.

The 1960s and 1970s were exactly the time when diasporic Chinese communities were bringing about an economic transformation in many parts of Southeast Asia by funnelling in foreign capital, and by creating new businesses and industries.

the most notable thing about my perspective on China, really, was that it scarcely existed. And this was, I think, the result of a certain way of perceiving not just China but also the world in general: it is an outlook in which the West looms so large that it obscures everything else.

the assumption that modernity was an exclusively Western creation that was transmitted to India, and the rest of the world, through contact, like ‘a virus that spreads from one place to another’. 9

It was as though an invisible hand had appeared in the room and were pointing out a whole range of objects that, in their very familiarity, had sunk so deep into my consciousness as to evade notice. These things—tea, sugar, porcelain—had never meant anything to me in themselves: they were just things, inanimate, silent and devoid of communicative ability.

certain objects are themselves the material, silent equivalent of words spoken by invisible, spectral forces and agencies that often form our lives without our being aware of it.

China’s historical presence in my world was easy to overlook because it was for the most part non-verbal: it was not usually attached to the kinds of discursive concepts, like ‘development’ and ‘progress’, that have played such a large part in the writing of modern history.

since language, of the human kind, is by definition an attribute of the species Homo sapiens, this means that all things non-human are, in principle, mute, in the sense that they cannot speak.

what of the tea itself? The pale brown liquid in my teacup was something far more complicated than an object: tea exists also as dried leaves, as a living plant and as a species that covers a significant part of the Earth’s surface. ‘Tea’, then, is a vast complex of plant matter that is found in multiple forms;

‘tea’ itself, a thing that is not a single object but a living entity, continuously evolving and finding new modes of articulation? This, in turn, would mean that the thing I had always so easily and unproblematically identified as ‘tea’ had a certain kind of vitality, a life that manifested itself in innumerable ways, seen and unseen.

when humans interact with certain plants the relationship is not unidirectional; people too are changed by that association. This gives us an inkling of why some cultures regard certain plants as spirits or deities, whose interactions with human beings are mysterious, sometimes benign and sometimes vengeful.

To look at China’s relationship with India through this lens is disorienting, but also, in some ways, enlightening. For this relationship is one in which botanical materials have played an inordinately large part, with certain plants entering into it so forcefully as to create patterns that have invisibly shaped culture and history, not just within Asia but also in Britain and America. So powerful, indeed, is the imprint of botanical matter on China’s relationship with the world that it demands exactly the kind of species-level humility that Kimmerer calls for, where it is acknowledged that there are beings and entities on this planet that have the power to amplify human intentions and intervene in relations between people.

humans have used many kinds of non-human entities in their relations with each other. Paradoxically, it is only by thinking of history without according primacy to humans, and by acknowledging the historical agency of botanical matter, that we can recognize the true nature of human intentions with regard to plants like tea. Conversely, it is the denial of the agency of certain non-human forces that often serves to occlude the intentions of humans who have used plants and other non-human entities to wage war upon their rivals and enemies.

Chinese tea is said to have been introduced to England by the wife of King Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. 2 The bride’s native country, Portugal, was the first European nation to enter the Indian Ocean; its network of bases and colonies included Macao, in southern China, which was leased to the Portuguese in 1557 by the ruling Ming dynasty. By 1662, when Catherine of Braganza’s marriage was celebrated, the Ming were in the last stages of their overthrow by the Qing dynasty, but the status of Macao remained unchanged. This meant that at the time of the wedding, Portugal had been consuming Chinese products for over a century, so the practice of tea drinking was already well-established among the country’s upper classes. In her dowry, Catherine brought with her two things that would prove to be of world-historical importance: a casket of tea and a set of six small islands that would later become Bombay (now Mumbai).

by the early eighteenth century, even before Britain established its empire in India, Chinese tea was already an important article of trade for the British economy.

Chinese tea remained the British East India Company’s prime source of revenue, much of which was used to finance British colonial expansion:

Is it really possible that the country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution was financially dependent, through the very period when it was industrializing, on a plant reared by humble peasants in the Far East? But so it was.

‘As the British Empire entered into battles in Europe and North America,’ writes the historian Andrew Liu, ‘the state increasingly relied upon raising tea duties to pay for war.’

for centuries a monopoly of the East India Company, and the customs duty on it was for a long time one of Britain’s most important sources of revenue.

Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the tax on tea accounted for nearly a tenth of Britain’s revenues. 9 It earned the British government as much as all land, property and income taxes put together: so vast was this sum of money that it could pay for the salaries of all government servants; for all public works and buildings; for all expenses related to law, justice, education, art and science; and for Her Majesty’s colonial, consular and foreign establishments—combined.

Chinese goods generally had to be paid for with silver. Because of the imbalance in trade, there was a huge outflow of bullion from the West to China. Despite the enormous imbalance between exports and imports, the trade was still profitable because Chinese goods bought with silver could be sold in Europe for two or three times what they had cost.

The European conquest of the Americas thus made the financing of the China trade possible by providing Europeans with massive stocks of bullion, mined by vast numbers of enslaved indigenous and African workers.

This left the East India Company with only one means of addressing its balance of trade problem with China: increasing the flow of exports from its Indian colonies. Cotton from India was one product for which there was already a considerable market in China. Another commodity in which there was a small but brisk trade was opium, harvested from a variety of poppy, Papaver somniferum. It was this plant that would become the solution for the problem posed by Camellia sinensis. So it happened that a plant that was already playing an important role in history opened the door for the proliferation of another, even more mysterious and powerful plant.

For me, as for many Indians, tea is now essential, indispensable, a constitutional necessity: I literally cannot function without it. This was true also of my mother and almost everyone I knew when I was growing up. Tea was not only integral to our well-being but also seen as an important element of the Indian identity.

it was not till the 1940s that tea gained popularity in the subcontinent, and even that was the result of what is probably the most brilliant advertising campaign in the history of modern India, involving some of the foremost artists and designers of the period,

much rejoicing in the East India Company: the old dream of using India to reduce Britain’s financial dependence on Chinese tea was at last within reach!

the colonial tea industry in India was, from the start, thoroughly dependent on Chinese expertise, labour and, in the words of a British Governor General, ‘Chinese agency’. 27

The one thing the British did not borrow from China was the pattern of tenancy under which tea was mainly produced there, with farmers working on small holdings with family labour. 29 In India tea was cultivated by a semi-free labour force of indentured workers, toiling on vast plantations that were mainly owned by white planters. 30

the colonial state enforced a highly racialized mode of production in which plantation owners were given tax concessions, free land and an indentured labour force that worked in thoroughly coercive conditions.

In effect, a pillar of the Chinese export economy was demolished through a process of technological theft initiated by the British Empire.

tea came to India as a corollary of a sustained contest—economic, social and military—between the West and China.

The conquest and colonization of the Americas had given Europeans a deep familiarity with this form of conflict. The English, in particular, had not only grown very skilled at it, but also succeeded in persuading themselves that their methods were less violent than those of the Spanish Empire because they relied more on structural rather than physical aggression in eliminating Native populations. This astonishing feat of doublethink was made possible by the fact that Europeans had come to conceive of ‘Nature’ as a domain that was completely separate from the human. Hence, they absolved themselves of all responsibility for the spread of disease, for example, by claiming that it was a ‘natural’ process over which they had no control, even though they often actively fomented the dispersion of pathogens by refusing to initiate measures that might have halted epidemics or environmental changes. Destruction through inaction thus became one of the essential features of biopolitical conflict. 39

The British had many allies in China, who benefited greatly from their mutual dealings. But their most important allies were from the Indian subcontinent, and they included Parsi and Marwari merchants, mercenary soldiers (‘ sepoys’) and sailors (‘ lascars’), as well as vast numbers of workers in various bureaucracies and ancillary industries.

The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, is believed to have originated in central or eastern Europe, possibly the Balkans, or around the coast of the Black Sea. 1 The flower appears to have forged, very early on, a special relationship with human beings: indeed, it is possible that the plant developed its chemical structure precisely to ensure that humans would propagate it. 2 This may be why there are no truly wild varieties of the opium poppy; they are all cultivars that evolved in collaboration with human beings, to enhance their medical and psychoactive properties. 3

opium remains pharmacologically indispensable to this day. Simply put, opium is perhaps the oldest and most powerful medicine known to man.

Opium has so many medicinal applications that it remains indispensable for the modern drug industry, just as it was for medieval apothecaries.

That opium can induce changes in consciousness has, of course, also been known since antiquity. But this does not seem to always have been a major factor in the circulation of the drug. In this, opium is completely different from wine, toddy, marijuana, coca, kava, peyote, ayahuasca, mescalin, psilocybin mushrooms, pituri and most other mind-altering substances known to humans—and, as is well known, there has, historically, never been any human society that did not use some mind-altering substance, or develop techniques like meditation, fasting or ordeals, to enter into altered states of consciousness.

opium also has innumerable beneficial uses, perhaps more so than any other psychoactive. It is precisely because of its extraordinary properties that opium also possesses the ability to generate a continually ascending series of more addictive forms, from the ma’jûn of the Middle Ages to chandu, morphine, heroin and oxycodone. Opium’s ability to spin off new and more potent versions of itself—even synthetic analogues like fentanyl—is one of the many tricks that the genie has often used to break out of its bottle. Once it escapes, it has a way of quickly transcending class and spreading from elites to those at the other end of the social ladder. This pattern too has repeated itself many times over throughout history. 24

I] t is perhaps appropriate,’ writes William B. McAllister, a US diplomat and historian, ‘to interpret opium as an actor in its own right. Rather than simply an inert substance, opium might be seen over the last three or four centuries as a sort of independent biological imperial agent. In recent decades [opium’s] worldwide ubiquity only confirms its power; opium appears to have bested all its human contenders.’ 25

It is because opium is a historical force in its own right that it must be approached with due attention to the ways in which it has interacted with humans over time. If these interactions are difficult to conceptualize it is largely because they are very strongly inflected by class and power differentials. But those difficulties are further compounded by the fact that the necessary vocabulary does not yet exist for thinking about history in a way that allows for the agency of non-human entities.

It was the Portuguese who discovered that opium could serve a useful diplomatic function as an item to be included in the gifts that they gave to local rulers to lubricate the flow of trade with their own country. 5 So it happened that the nexus between state power and trade, so characteristic of mercantilist Europe, slowly but surely turned opium into something that it had never been before—an instrument of state policy.

When the Dutch replaced the Portuguese as the dominant power in the Indian Ocean, they expanded the practice of gifting opium by incorporating it into their relentless quest for monopolies over Asian trade commodities, like nutmeg, mace and cloves. 6 Having succeeded in cornering the market in several other spices, they then set their sights on pepper, which, in terms of quantity and value, was by far the most important component of the spice trade. But pepper was a more difficult proposition than cloves, nutmeg and mace because it grew in several regions. Of these the most important were the kingdoms and principalities of the Malabar Coast, where it was traded for either silver or other goods. Historically, opium had played no part in the trade, but once Europeans began to distribute it as a gift, the demand for the drug grew so quickly that the Dutch traders were able to use it as a currency, to acquire pepper on the Malabar Coast. 7 The Dutch were thus the first to discover that the demand for opium and opiates can grow almost unstoppably once supplies are made easily available.

the VOC had to fight innumerable small but brutal ‘opium wars’ to prevent local rulers from limiting the circulation of opium in their territories. 27 This pattern would later be replicated, on a much larger scale, by Britain in China. In other words, the Dutch created a template in the seventeenth century that ensured, as Hans Derks notes, that ‘almost all Asiatic wars’ would henceforth have ‘a strong narco-character through to the present, including the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars’. 28

In 1815, the newly crowned Dutch monarch, formerly Prince Willem Frederik of Orange-Nassau, founded an enterprise called the Royal Dutch Trading Company (Koninklijke Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij or NHM). Due to its royal sponsorship, the company became so powerful in the Dutch East Indies that it was able to take over the colonial opium monopoly. 36 The practices of the Royal Dutch Trading Company were so harsh that they became the target of a passionate denunciation in the novel Max Havelaar by the Dutch writer Eduard Douwes Dekker, better known as Multatuli. 37 While the company no longer exists today, its legacy lives on, as is the case with many other enterprises that profited from the opium trade. Its offshoots include an energy giant that has worked hard to promote denialism regarding fossil fuels and climate change: Royal Dutch/ Shell. 38

In the late nineteenth century powerful members of the royal family established a tin-mining company on the Sumatran island of Billiton (Belitung) as a private undertaking. Through the influence of its royal patrons, the company also acquired the license to sell opium to its overworked and much-abused labour force, most of which was Chinese. That company is now one of the most important mining enterprises in the world—BHP Billiton (BHP Group Limited). 40 In sum, it was the Dutch who led the way in enmeshing opium with colonialism, and in creating the first imperial narco-state, heavily dependent on drug revenues. But it was in India that the model of the colonial narco-state was perfected by the British. 41

Although the Dutch had a lead of a few decades in the East Indies, the English were constantly snapping at their heels. In 1623, the rivalry culminated in the execution of ten Englishmen—along with nine Japanese ronin and one Eurasian—in Amboyna (now Ambon), the Dutch capital in the Moluccas. 42 It was only after this that English territorial ambitions moved away from the East Indies and came to be focused on the Indian subcontinent. The British East India Company’s first permanent settlement in India was founded just four years after the Amboyna incident, near the city of Madras (now Chennai). In the decades that followed the Company would acquire Bombay, and also establish the city of Calcutta. It was the latter that became the launching pad for the East India Company’s expansion into the Gangetic plain, the heartland of northern India. This region was known historically as Purvanchal (‘ eastern region’): its people were the Purbiyas (‘ easterners’) and its principal language was Bhojpuri, which is now considered a dialect of Hindi. 43

Over time a thriving market in military labour came into being in the Gangetic plain, and men of diverse castes and tribes resorted to it for employment. The military labour market was vital to the economy of the region because, contrary to popular myth, pre-colonial India was neither sedentary nor unchanging: it was turbulent, unsettled and extremely dynamic, a land of adventurers, where soldiering and war-making were major industries that employed as much as a quarter of the population.

The military labour market was also, as the historian Dirk Kolff has shown, an important avenue of social mobility, through which people could change and re-invent their place in the caste hierarchy. 45 The market was, therefore, a critical strategic resource: any rising power that sought to expand into northern India had to be able to recruit sepoys and camp-followers from the Gangetic plain. The East India Company also drew on this region for its native troops: even before it annexed Bihar it was recruiting Purbiyas for its territorial armies in three different parts of the subcontinent. These Bihari sepoys tended to be largely upper-caste Hindus, mainly Brahmins and Rajputs. 46

large-scale conversion of paddy fields into poppy cultivation,’ writes the historian Emdad-ul Haq, ‘contributed to a famine in Bengal in 1770. This famine caused the death of 10 million people in an area that had been traditionally known as the “Golden Bengal” due to its natural resources.’ 48 In 1772, the Governor General of India, Warren Hastings, resolved the matter by placing Bihar’s opium production wholly under the control of the East India Company. From then on farmers could sell their opium only to the Company’s designated agents; local merchants who bought or sold the drug were deemed smugglers. 49 This shut French and Dutch merchants out of the trade, much to the detriment of Bihari farmers, who actually preferred to do business with other Europeans since they paid better than the English. 50

For the colonial regime the opium market was a windfall and it could not have come at a better time: this was exactly the period when the taxes on Chinese tea were becoming increasingly indispensable sources of revenue, both for Britain and for the East India Company. At the same time Chinese tea was becoming increasingly difficult to acquire because of the dwindling supplies of silver from the Americas.

Europeans did not, by any means, invent the opium trade. Rather, as with the traffic in human beings on the Atlantic Coast, they took certain pre-existing, small-scale practices and transformed them while also expanding them by orders of magnitude.

the story of a Mughal opium monopoly is but another instance of the British Empire’s remarkable talents in self-exculpatory myth-making. 62 This is indeed one of the most astonishing aspects of the West’s involvement with opium in Asia. Not only did Western colonizers succeed in using opium to extract incalculable wealth from Asians, but they were successful also in obscuring their own role in the trade by claiming that it had existed from time immemorial because non-white people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity.

Purvanchal was, historically, one of the richest, most fertile and most culturally creative parts of the Indian subcontinent—indeed the world. Yet, by the time of Rivett-Carnac’s tours, the region had already fallen into the besetting poverty and stagnation that haunt it to this day.

Purvanchal’s present condition is a historical anomaly, one that dates back to the very time when it began to supply the East India Company with the two vital resources it needed for its growth—sepoys and drugs.

‘The yawning gap between the vast revenues earned from opium and the minimal outlay on labor costs invited fraud and corruption as inequalities widened year by year.’

The system was, therefore, coercive to its core: not only did farmers have to deal with the ever-looming threat of violence, but they also had no choice other than to plant poppies because the Opium Department stipulated that nothing else could be grown on land that had been earmarked for that purpose. 35 Farmers could be evicted if they planted any other crop, and since most poppy growers were ‘tenants at will’, they were in constant danger of losing their land. 36 So strict and punitive were the laws of the Opium Department that farmers were essentially trapped within a net of legal obligations and debt bondage. Even in times of famine, they had no recourse but to grow poppies in order to slake the British Empire’s inexhaustible appetite for opium. 37

the East India Company’s monopoly had brought into being, as monopolies are apt to, a thriving ‘black market’.

While some British officials recognized that the abysmal prices given to farmers and the low pay of local employees were the sources of the Opium Department’s problems, others came to be convinced that corruption, apathy and ‘utter disregard of moral principle’ was endemic to Indians as a race. This view was shared by the leadership of the colonial regime: ‘Calls from the agents in Bihar and Benares to raise the pay of their Indian subordinates met with repeated dismissals from the Opium Board in Calcutta, who justified their reluctance with reference to the “moral turpitude” of the native population, whose “apathy and indolence … are proverbial.”’ 47

to this day one of the world’s largest producers of legal opium, manufactured for medicinal use. 3 This confers on the Ghazipur Opium Factory the distinction of being one of the oldest continuously functioning industrial plants in the world.

the opium trade was also seen as a necessary evil in that it provided the British Empire with the funds that it needed in order to go about the business of converting its subject peoples to the worship of Progress.

The only parts of Asia where opium was sponsored by ruling regimes were the colonies run by Europeans—the Dutch East Indies, India, the Philippines and, later, French Indo-China.

the Emperor ultimately decided that the state had no recourse but to suppress the traffic. To that end the Emperor sent Lin Zexu, one of China’s most able and honest civil servants, to Guangzhou as a high commissioner with special powers. Arriving in Guangzhou in January 1839, Lin Zexu acted quickly, issuing proclamations that not only banned the opium trade, but also demanded that foreign merchants surrender all their stocks of opium. 40 When they refused, he put them under house arrest in the Foreign Enclave. 41 This induced them to change their minds, and they surrendered a total of 10,75,000 kilograms of opium, all of which was destroyed in an operation that was personally overseen by Lin Zexu himself. 42 For the British government, the merchants’ losses became the casus belli for war: it launched its attack on China in 1840, initiating the conflict known as the First Opium War—a war that needed to be fought, as one British opium trader matter-of-factly explained, because ‘6 millions [pounds] sterling are actually at stake, being nearly one-tenth part of the entire revenues of Great Britain and her Indian empire’. 43

After suffering several catastrophic defeats, the Qing state signed the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, whereby it was forced to compensate foreign opium traffickers to the tune of 6 million silver dollars. The other conditions included the opening of four other ports to foreign traders (and smugglers) and ceding the island of Hong Kong to the British as a colony. The island thereafter became the main hub of opium smuggling in China.

By the late 1840s it was estimated, three-quarters of the entire Indian opium crop passed through Hong Kong.’ 44

To look at Shiva Lal’s pictures, or at photographs of the factories, is to be astonished, all over again, by the fact that the people who were producing incalculable amounts of capital for rapidly industrializing countries like Britain and the United States were actually legions of underpaid workers, whose labour, far from bringing any advancement to their homelands, would eventually turn those once-prosperous lands into regions marked by poverty and strife.

the ‘resource curse’ that often results from the intensive mining of precious metals and minerals. The analogy is apt but also inadequate, since gold and silver mines do not produce a renewable resource and are usually worked to exhaustion within a few decades. The British opium regime, on the other hand, endured for more than a century and a half: the sheer longevity, as much as the oppressiveness of the system, ensured that it would have deep and lasting effects.

The long-term effects of this system of surveillance and criminalization continue to manifest themselves in the discord and lack of social trust that plague much of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand to this day.

One of the reasons why the British were able to win the war of 1857 was that a new source of military manpower had opened up for them in the Punjab, which, ironically, they had conquered a short while before with the support of battalions of Purbiyas. The animosities generated by the Purbiya role in the defeat of the Sikh kingdom played no small part in causing Sikh Punjabis to side with the British in 1857.19 Thereafter the Punjab became a major recruiting ground, and in order to retain the loyalty of Punjabi troops the colonial regime invested heavily in the region, over decades, launching massive irrigation and land reclamation projects. The British embrace of the Punjab had other, more subtle, effects as well, providing better access to education and promoting other sectors of the economy, like construction, war provisioning and so on. As a result, the area that constituted the Punjab before 1947 remains, to this day, probably the single most prosperous region of the subcontinent. The lopsided and uneven development of the Indian subcontinent is thus directly traceable to colonial policies, as is the disproportionate weightage of Punjabis in the Indian and Pakistani armies, even today.

The long-term fallout of these developments were catastrophic for the Gangetic heartland. In India military service was not just a vital source of employment; it was also the principal avenue of social mobility. This portal was now slammed shut in the faces of those who had depended on it the most. At the same time the farmers of the region were compelled to continue producing opium at considerable loss to themselves, and with no commensurate investment from the colonial authorities. It is scarcely surprising then that this is now the poorest region in India, often derided as the ‘sick’ (bimaru) part of the country. Nor is it surprising that it is the region where social hierarchies are most entrenched and oppressive. As the Nobel prize–winning economist Abhijit Banerjee and his colleague Lakshmi Iyer have shown, divergent colonial policies, implemented 150 years ago, have continued to influence regional differences in India in relation to inequality, health and educational outcomes, and levels of violent crime to this day. 20

in the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of people were choosing to indenture themselves rather than remain at home in Bihar. Why, then, would my forebears, who were also from the Kayastha caste, and whose hereditary occupations were scribe, clerk and bookkeeper, choose to make that impoverished region their destination? Was it perhaps because they had found jobs in the growing industry that was transporting thousands of indentured workers out of Bihar? Many Bengali clerical workers were indeed employed in the colonial offices that managed the process of emigration, and some of them—as I would find out later in Mauritius—have left their mark on that story.

That Bihar is now often described as being steeped in tradition and backwardness is a complete reversal of the reality. What the region is actually mired in, as Phoolsunghi so brilliantly shows, is not ‘tradition’ but rather a particular iteration of colonial modernity, one that followed the imposition of an entirely new and thoroughly modern industrial system centred upon the production of opium. 11 What is truly staggering to contemplate, however, is that the upheavals caused by the opium regime, which profoundly altered the lives of millions of people, and shaped my family’s destiny, were not dictated by any local or regional imperatives. They were rather the unintended consequences of the ongoing, centuries-long relationship of conflict and competition between two foreign powers located at the far ends of the Eurasian landmass—Great Britain and China.

The trouble with trying to monopolize a botanical commodity is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrict a species to any determinate region, especially if those plants also happen to generate huge profits. The Dutch, in the eighteenth century, had tried to restrict the cultivation of clove and nutmeg trees to certain specifically designated islands. However, the policy was undermined not only by indigenous resistance, but also by the trees themselves: they grew in such abundance in the forests of Maluku that they were impossible to extirpate.

there are some uncanny similarities between the nineteenth-century opium industry of Malwa and that of present-day Afghanistan. Just as in Malwa, cash advances from landowners and moneylenders played a large part in the expansion of poppy farming in Afghanistan after 1980; there too crops were often bought up a year in advance by cartels; and there too the opium economy has been an important source of income and employment in uncertain times. 30 As a result, the US military’s attempts to eradicate the industry created enormous resentment against the US-backed government that was put in place after 2001, and ultimately caused its downfall. 31

The brute fact is that it was a flower that defeated the mightiest military power in human history: the opium poppy may be humble in appearance, but it is one of the most powerful Beings that humans have encountered in their time on earth. To be sure, tea, sugarcane, tobacco, rubber, cotton, Yersinia pestis, and many other plants and pathogens have played major roles in human history, some of them over several centuries. But today they are all much diminished in their influence, while the opium poppy is mightier than ever.

Today, at a time when ‘the economy’ and ‘business’ are thought to be insulated spheres that function according to their own laws, it has become customary to lionize merchants and businessmen for their shrewdness and entrepreneurialism. But the real lesson to be learnt from the commercial world of western India is that political and military support have always been crucial to the flourishing of business and enterprise in the modern era.

‘British Bombay, unlike Calcutta, was never essentially a colonial city,’ writes Gillian Tindall. ‘The real life of Bombay was always lived in … a more cosmopolitan and egalitarian setting; in warehouses … in counting houses, in places where samples of raw cotton or opium or silk or ivory or inlay-work were passed from hand to hand.’ 35 So while Bombay prospered, Calcutta’s economy remained quintessentially colonial, structured around racial and communal hierarchies, and dependent on agricultural products like opium, jute and tea, all wrung out of the soil by underpaid and ill-used workers.

Such were the differences between the two cities that Mumbai became the country’s economic and financial powerhouse, while Calcutta became the hotbed of India’s radicalism, as well as a hub for the academic discipline of economics. Mumbai, it could be said, got the economy, while Calcutta got the economists.

The fact that local traders and small businessmen were excluded from the region’s most lucrative industry certainly meant that an indigenous capitalist class could not develop at the same pace as it had in the Bombay Presidency. To those who were shut out by the colonial opium monopoly it would have seemed self-evident that markets were always rigged, as such, and could not be trusted. But these attitudes also nurtured another, quite different, set of beliefs: if it is in the nature of markets to be rigged, then it follows that all you have to do to make money is find players who know how to rig them. Thus Calcutta also became—and has long remained—the Ponzi scheme capital of India: the city’s inhabitants seem to be drawn, like moths to a flame, to financial scams, which are known locally as ‘chit funds’. Repeatedly, decade after decade, Bengalis have shown themselves to be peculiarly prone to squandering their life’s savings on pyramid schemes started by hucksters who are usually also Bengalis.

Bombay and its hinterlands thus benefited from Malwa’s opium in multiple ways. Not only did the wealth generated by the region’s poppy farmers seep into the pockets of more people, but the returns on opium that were brought back from China also fostered a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. The opium that was exported from Calcutta, on the other hand, brought no such gains to the city or its hinterland: the trade conferred its benefits instead on Britain, the United States and Europe.

opium was not the only commodity that Bombay’s merchants exported: cotton also played a very important role in their trade with China. 52 But opium was the ‘keystone commodity’ of their business, and what the historian Jacques M. Downs says of American traders in China applies no less to Indians: ‘… the entire China trade, was based on the opium traffic … Without opium it is difficult to see how the legitimate China trade could have developed.’ 53

Singapore was also a free market experiment—there were no taxes on trade and no duties on imports or exports—made possible only because of opium, which generally provided about half the city’s revenues. No less than 20 per cent of India’s opium ended up in Singapore every year: although much of it was redistributed throughout the region, a large part was also consumed in the city. In effect, the ‘rhythms of the opium trade more or less governed the economic development of nineteenth-century Singapore’. 61

In Singapore, as in most of Southeast Asia, opium was administered through the so-called ‘farm’ system, wherein the right to import raw opium belonged solely to the colonial authorities; the rights to process and sell the drug were periodically auctioned off to local bidders. The merchant or, more commonly, the syndicate that put in the winning bid was known as the ‘farmer’, and the network of processing centres and dens where the raw opium was distilled into smokeable chandu was the ‘farm’.

Throughout Southeast Asia the opium farms were almost always run by diasporic Chinese merchants and syndicates. 64 In most of the region the consumers—usually plantation workers and miners—were also largely Chinese,

Among the Chinese who ran the opium farms, many belonged to the Peranakan community, a diasporic group with deep roots in the region. 67 As with the Parsis and Armenians, countless early Chinese migrants in Southeast Asia were displaced by war, rebellion and political turmoil in their homeland, especially during the tumultuous transition between the Ming and Qing dynasties. Like Parsis in India, the Peranakan were gradually assimilated into Southeast Asian culture: not only did they, like Parsis, speak local languages and wear clothes that were adapted from local garments, but they, like Parsis, also evolved a hybrid and very highly refined cuisine.

Across Southeast Asia, Peranakan merchants controlled many plantations and mines, in which thousands of poor Chinese migrants toiled under terrible conditions: for most of these workers opium was a necessity just to get through the day. ‘In dulling their very real pain, opium made them insensitive to the long-term damage their exhausting labor was doing to their own bodies. They could literally work themselves to death without feeling much pain.’ 68

In numerous instances, it was the opium farm, rather than a mine or a plantation, that generated the bulk of the owners’ profits. Opium thus became a very important source of capital accumulation for diasporic Chinese elites in Southeast Asia.

Opium was thus, in every way, crucial to the making of Southeast Asia’s modern economy, providing not only sustenance for what is arguably the region’s most important city, Singapore, but also the seed capital for entrepreneurs and industrialists. Most of the prominent and well-respected families in nineteenth-century Singapore were directly or indirectly linked to the opium farms: the names of the farmers are, in fact, a ‘virtual who’s who of Chinese in Singapore’. 71

The staggering reality is that many of the cities that are now pillars of the modern globalized economy—Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai—were initially sustained by opium. In other words, it wasn’t Free Trade or the autonomous laws of the market that laid the foundations of globalized economy: it was a monopolistic trade in a drug produced under colonial auspices by poor Asian farmers, a substance that creates addiction, the very negation of freedom. This, as Trocki notes, was the fundamental paradox of the colonial system itself: ‘A ruling power that took much pride in its laws and system of justice was dependent on an “illegal” and virtually totalitarian system of social control to maintain its tax base.’ 78

opium money seeped so deep into nineteenth-century Britain that it essentially became invisible through ubiquity.

Downs combed through the records of all the major traders, which together constitute an archive of monumental proportions, having been preserved by ‘New Englanders and Philadelphians—people who never discard anything, be it documents, clothes, broken furniture, or outworn institutions’. 1

during the colonial period Americans were expressly forbidden to trade with China, that being the exclusive prerogative of the East India Company. As a result the tea that Americans drank had to be routed through Britain, which made it more expensive. The resentments generated by this exploded in 1773 with the Boston Tea Party,

What else? For a while the answer was furs and sealskins, and that was how two Massachusetts families—the Delanos and the Perkinses—were drawn into the China trade along with John Jacob Astor, America’s most prominent vendor of furs. 18 However, despite their initial success in selling furs to the Chinese, they soon encountered an insurmountable challenge: there were only so many seals and sea otters that could be killed before their numbers dwindled to a point where it was no longer economical to hunt them. Sandalwood became the next solution and several Pacific islands were ransacked until they were thoroughly depleted of sandalwood trees;

the success of the British drug-running operation induced American merchants to look for other sources of opium, and they found a good one in Izmir (Smyrna), which was the outlet for Turkey’s principal opium-growing region in the interior. 22 The pioneers in the Turkish drug trade were the brothers James Smith Wilcocks and Benjamin Chew Wilcocks, from a prominent Philadelphia family. 23 The Wilcocks brothers travelled as supercargoes on the first American ship to carry Turkish opium, the Pennsylvania, in 1805. The ship disposed of its fifty chests of Izmir opium even before reaching China; the cargo was sold in Jakarta. 24 The success of this pioneering effort created something of an ‘opium rush’ among leading American merchants like John Jacob Astor of New York, Joseph Peabody of Salem and Stephen Girard of Philadelphia.

the big opium-trading clans of Boston—the Perkins, Sturgis, Russell and Forbes families, who were all as intricately interrelated as the Mafia lineages of southern Italy. They called themselves ‘the Boston Concern’ and the eventual merger of their firms would make them the single biggest opium-trading network in China. 40 The wealth they gained from the opium trade would establish them as core members of the elite circle that Oliver Wendell Holmes called ‘the Boston Brahmins’, America’s closest equivalent to an aristocracy. 41

Who were these fortunate Americans? It is no accident that their names read like a litany of the Northeastern upper crust: Astor, Cabot, Peabody, Brown, Archer, Hathaway, Webster, Delano, Coolidge, Forbes, Russell, Perkins, Bryant and so on. They were mostly from the more privileged ranks of white settler society, families of British origin that had long been settled in the north-east. 43 Many of them were educated in elite schools like the Boston Latin School, Milton Academy, Phillips Academy Andover, Phillips Exeter Academy and so on, and many went to universities like Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Brown (named after a prominent slave-and opium-trading family from Providence, Rhode Island). 44 To belong to an upper-crust Northeastern family in the early nineteenth century was different from being a member of other white elites, such as those of Europe or even the American South. The Northeastern elite was not principally a landowning group but a largely professional and mercantile class, subject to the fluctuations of a young and erratic economy. Businesses failed so frequently that even the most well-connected families lived with a certain degree of precarity.

schooner-rigged clippers were able to sail against the wind, and so the opium trade went from being a seasonal affair to a year-round commerce, in which speed was of the essence.

another traffic that was gaining momentum in the 1830s. It was in this period, after the banning of slavery in the Empire, that transporting Indian indentured workers to British colonies was becoming a lucrative business for shipowners.

lascars are not a tribe or nation, that ‘they came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese’.

it was not considered untoward for white men to inflict incalculable harm on other peoples, especially if it was done in faraway places. In a country where Native Americans were being dispossessed and slain en masse, and where millions of enslaved black people were toiling on plantations, selling opium to the distant Chinese probably did not appear particularly reprehensible.

addiction was considered a moral failing, associated with people who were inherently weak-natured and naturally disposed to vice. These assumptions too remain powerfully embedded in contemporary American culture: the makers of prescription opioids took advantage of them by consistently presenting opioid addicts as people who were congenitally weak, incapable of self-restraint and prone to addiction.

As they saw it, their first duty was to make profits for their investors and stockholders. It was on exactly these grounds that Robert Bennet Forbes rejected British pleas to join in the evacuation of Guangzhou: his blunt reply to Charles Elliot was ‘that his obligations to his owners took precedence over other considerations, whether of honor, patriotism, or the long-run benefit of the community’. 93 There could be no clearer summation of the most important accomplishment of the doctrine of Free Trade—the erasure of all ethical constraints in regard to profit-making.

no matter how genteel their manners, no matter how earnest their religious fervour, the British and American traders in Guangzhou belonged to an Anglo-American elite that had made a fine art of spouting pieties of various kinds while inflicting immeasurable harm on people around the world.

It was precisely by actively creating a ‘public taste’ for opium, among ‘discountenanced’ and dispirited American communities, that the producers of prescription opioids addicted millions of people to prescription opiates. And, to a quite remarkable degree, those behind the opioid crisis—the rogue doctors, pharmacists, salesmen, executives and tycoons—were as indifferent to the suffering they had caused as their nineteenth-century predecessors.

But the ideology of Free Trade capitalism sanctioned entirely new levels of depravity in the pursuit of profit, and the demons that were engendered as a result have now so viscerally taken hold of the world that they can probably never be exorcized.

the garden plants of China eventually came to enrich gardens in much of the rest of the world … Amongst the best known of these plants are peaches, peonies, chrysanthemums, camellias, gardenias, azaleas, forsythias, wisteria, and crabapples, to mention but a few.

marks left by the invisible hands that shaped the visual language of Indian modernity.

Many of Guangzhou’s artists were descended from working-class families and had connections with porcelain kilns. Makers of Chinese porcelain were experienced in catering to European tastes, and skilled in using stencils to reproduce Western designs. Guangzhou’s artists brought some of these very skills into their studios—there too stencils began to be used extensively; in fact, many of their paintings and images were assembled rather than created afresh each time. 67 This was, then, a veritable industry of image-making—mechanical reproduction without machines! This tradition has continued unbroken into our time: Dafen village, near Shenzhen, is today ‘the world’s largest production center for hand-painted art, China’s model art industry, and the Western retailer’s best source for oil reproductions of Western masterpieces’. 68

in China, Kesri is fighting on several fronts for different purposes. One is to force the Chinese to continue to import Indian opium. But this, in turn, means that he is also inadvertently ensuring that families like his own will have to go on cultivating poppies under the Opium Department’s draconian regime. In this sense, Kesri is the colonial subject not just of the British but also of the opium poppy, since he is part of a campaign that is being fought to make sure that the plant will continue to expand its dominion. And as Kesri is a sepoy of the East India Company, it follows that the British, unbeknownst to themselves, are also sepoys of the opium poppy: they who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are actually serving the purposes of a Being whose vitality and power they are incapable of acknowledging. In other words, in colonizing the poppy fields of Bihar, the colonizers have themselves been colonized—by a non-human entity whose intelligence, patience and longevity far exceed that of humans.

By the 1880s, opium was one of the most valuable commodities moving in international trade. In an average year, export opium leaving Calcutta and Bombay averaged over 90,000 chests, containing more than 5,400 metric tons. This staggering amount would meet the annual needs of between 13 and 14 million opium consumers in China and Southeast Asia who smoked opium on a daily basis. 9

‘It would not be too far-fetched to suggest,’ writes the indigenous scholar Marcia Langton, ‘that alcohol was from the very beginning of British settlement a crucially important strategy in dealing with Aboriginal people … [A] lcohol was, consciously or unconsciously used by the British as a device for seducing the Aboriginal people to engage economically, politically and socially with the colony.’ 25

Richard Sackler, the head of Purdue Pharma, launched a massive drive to promote prescription opioids; recognizing that there was a stigma against strong opioids in the medical establishment, Purdue Pharma ‘executed a brilliant strategy to remove that barrier and clear the way’. The Sacklers had long specialized in medical advertising, and the claim that opioids had been ‘unfairly stigmatized’ was a central plank of their strategy. 36 Richards’s reference to the ‘demonization of opiates’ suggests that Purdue Pharma’s propaganda might have had some influence on him, albeit subconscious.

John Cameron, owner and editor of Singapore’s The Straits Times, was also candid in acknowledging that revenue was a far greater concern for British colonizers than public welfare. In 1865 he wrote in his own paper: ‘With the East India Company revenue was a matter of considerably greater solicitude than the moral condition of the large populations under their rule; and there can be very little question that the opium farm had its origin in the necessities of the local exchequer.’ 66 In the late nineteenth century, when the global anti-opium movement began to gather strength, such views were stated with increasing vehemence. ‘[ India] cannot afford,’ declared The Straits Times in 1881, ‘to sacrifice an annual revenue of eight millions sterling at the bidding of sentimental fanatics and spurious philanthropy based on imaginary facts and false argumentation.’ 67

By the late nineteenth century, opium had become so crucial to the colonial edifice that the industry was, in effect, deemed by many important people, both British and Indian, to be ‘too big to fail’. ‘Opium may be a great evil,’ opined The Hindu newspaper in 1895, ‘but national bankruptcy is a greater evil.’ 70

striking parallels with modern-day corporate ‘climate denial’. Energy corporations, and their defenders, frequently allude to the needs of the global poor as a reason why fossil fuel industries should continue to expand. The fact that it is the poor who will bear the brunt of the disastrous impacts of climate change is conveniently swept under the carpet, just as the protests of Bihari poppy farmers were in the nineteenth century. 72

no amount of sophistry can disguise the fact that the British Empire’s opium racket was a criminal enterprise, utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.

In thinking about the opium poppy’s role in history it is hard to ignore the feeling of an intelligence at work. The single most important indication of this is the poppy’s ability to create cycles of repetition, which manifest themselves in similar phenomena over time. What the opium poppy does is clearly not random; it builds symmetries that rhyme with each other. It is important to recognize that these cycles will go on repeating, because the opium poppy is not going away anytime soon. In Mexico, for instance, despite intensive eradication efforts the acreage under poppy cultivation has continued to increase. 80 Indeed, there is more opium being produced in the world today than at any time in the past.

Only by recognizing the power and intelligence of the opium poppy can we even begin to make peace with it. To do so, however, would mean parting company with many ideas that have long been dominant, such as the notion that the earth is inert and humans are the only agents of history. Clearly, there are many other entities and beings that have not only shaped history but have also used humans for their own ends. The opium poppy is, undoubtedly, one of the most powerful of these because of its unmatched ability to propagate itself by bonding with humanity’s darkest propensities. Today, in a world where climate disruptions are intensifying, and many formerly stable institutions are crumbling, it is more and more evident that much of what we have been taught about the past is untrue. Indeed, what was truly new about the great ‘take-off’ of the nineteenth century was that it created a system in which indifference to human suffering was not just accepted by ruling elites but was justified and promoted by a plethora of false teleologies and deceptive theories. What this led to was, for the most part, a kind of ‘slow violence’, inflicted not by weaponry but rather by inaction, and refusals to intervene. Such violence gives the appearance of being—and indeed, often is—unintentional, because it is enabled principally by institutional indifference. It is this that made it possible for European empires to push opium on China and Southeast Asia, and it is what makes it possible today for the wealthy and powerful to be suicidally indifferent to the prospect of a global catastrophe. In such a world, does it serve any purpose to recount this bleak and unedifying story? This question has haunted me since I first started working on this book, many years ago. It was the reason why, at a certain point, I felt I could not go on, even though I had already accumulated an enormous amount of material. It seemed to me then that Tagore had got it exactly right when he wrote: ‘in the Indo-China opium traffic, human nature itself sinks down to such a depth of despicable meanness, that it is hateful even to follow the story to its conclusion.’ So persuaded was I of this that I decided to abandon the project: I cancelled the contracts I had signed, and returned the advances I had been paid by my publishers.

Looking back now I realize that it was not only because of the ‘despicable meanness’ of the story that I gave up on the project. There is also an inherent conceptual difficulty in telling a story of this kind: the problem lies in the inescapable presence of a non-human protagonist, a plant. This is, I think, one of the principal reasons why many histories of India, China, the British Empire and the United States skirt around this subject: it is very difficult to narrate a story in which a botanical entity is both instrument and protagonist. It was not because of a conceptual breakthrough that I decided to take up the challenge once again. Rather it was the increasingly evident vitality of the Earth—or rather, Gaia—that gave me the impetus to carry on. The climate-intensified events of recent years have made it abundantly clear that there are many kinds of forces—biological, geological and atmospheric—that possess vital, agentive properties of their own. These forces may give the impression of being temporarily under human control, but beyond a certain point they are fully capable of asserting their independence and ascendancy. There is no better example of this than the story of the opium poppy; it is at once a cautionary tale about human hubris, and a lesson about humanity’s limits and frailties. At a time when elite hucksters and all-powerful billionaires are trying to peddle the idea of solar geoengineering there is nothing more important than to remember that every one of the interconnected crises that humanity now confronts is the unintended consequence of interventions conceived of by men who believed that their superior education and privilege entitled them to over-ride all customary, common-sense constraints. Now, if ever, is the time for humility, in relation to other species and to the Earth itself.

The United States was another country where concerns about opium became widespread in the late nineteenth century, not least because it was then dealing with its own addiction problem brought on by the invention of the hypodermic syringe and the extensive use of opiates during the Civil War. 21 Morphine dependence came to be known as ‘morphinism’ or ‘soldier’s disease’, and the German pharmaceutical company Bayer Laboratories soon came up with a ‘cure’ that was touted as non-addictive, even though it was also an opioid. This was none other than heroin, the name of which was ‘derived from the German for “heroic”’. 22 Packaged in bottles with colourful labels, heroin, writes Beth Macy, was ‘sold widely from drugstore counters, no prescription necessary, not only for veterans but also for women with menstrual cramps and babies with hiccups’. 23 At the start of the twentieth century some 300,000 Americans were addicted to opioids. President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908, appointed a special commissioner, Dr Hamilton Wright, to deal with the problem. 24

between 1955 and 1975 the French and American secret services made extensive use of opium during the wars in Vietnam, and in other conflicts. When returning soldiers planted the problem of addiction in the heart of Middle America, the United States’ violent and blundering response, in the form of the War on Drugs, created disastrous consequences for large parts of Latin America, and for minorities at home, while also accelerating the growth of the carceral state.