Show threadbs2Feb 14, 2024
> .. recreational.. [opium use] did not become widespread until the 19th century, when the arduous cultivation and refinement process was streamlined and industrialized. Poppies require an enormous amount of water and care, and even when the finicky flowers have been coaxed to bloom, it is no trifling matter to transform them into a smokable substance...
#OpiumTrade #OpiumIndustrialization (2/3)
bs2Feb 14, 2024
> Customs duties on tea — of up to 125 percent — amounted to nearly a tenth of Britain’s revenue, bankrolling its wars. Yet China required little from Britain apart from payment in silver, which the nation found increasingly inconvenient to source. Britain realized it could solve this “balance of trade problem” by increasing its Indian colonies’ “small but brisk” opium trade.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/books/review/smoke-and-ashes-amitav-ghosh.html
#DeliaFalconer on #TeaTrade in #SmokeAndAshes
#AmitavGosh #BritainAndChina #OpiumTrade
Book Review: ‘Smoke and Ashes,’ by Amitav Ghosh

In “Smoke and Ashes,” Amitav Ghosh sources the colonial roots of a crisis.

The New York Times
bs2Feb 14, 2024

> ".. if gain-seeking desires had not cauterised their souls" Governer of Canton Lin Zexu

> ".. we should thus certainly put a value on riches and slight men's lives" Chinese Commissioner Keying

https://archive.org/details/indochineseopium00hillrich
#JSpencerHill in #IndoChineseOpiumTrade
/HT #AmitavGhosh in #SmokeAndAshes #OpiumTrade #DrugWar #OpiumWars #DrugWars #LinZexu

The Indo-Chinese opium trade : considered in relation to its history, morality, and expediency, and its influence on Christian missions : Hill, J. Spencer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

vii, 95 p. ; 17 cm

Internet Archive
bs2Feb 13, 2024
> the views of merchants like Matheson.. blame China’s corruption not only for the very existence of the #OpiumTrade but also for their own wrongdoings (‘Look what you made me do!’).. the pattern of causality was complicated.. exploitation of pre-existing vulnerabilities in the system contributed greatly to the.. corrosion of Chinese structures of governance..
> This.. would establish a template for Western #ResourceExtraction around the world: mining and energy corporations..
#SmokeAndAshes
bs2Feb 8, 2024

_Smoke and Ashes_ had me thinking of _The Wire_: a drug dealer is reading Adam Smith and seems about to go legit. If he wasn't killed, what was next?

> ... contrary to ‘free market’ mythologies, those fortunes were made possible ultimately by the structures of kinship, class and race that allowed the #CantonGraduates to monopolize the American share of the nineteenth-century #OpiumTrade.

#DrugDealers #DrugTrade #SmokeAndAshes and #TheWire
#TheWireSmokeAndAshes

Show threadbs2Feb 7, 2024
> ... China was quite exceptional. But things began to change with the #OpiumWars, the extraction of concessions from China by European countries. The system began to fragment. Local mandarins frequently became corrupt and sold off the granaries. China in the 1860s experienced three civil wars, the largest of which — the #TaipingRebellion
— is probably the bloodiest in world history.
#ChinaTrade #OpiumTrade
Show threadbs2Feb 7, 2024

> China in the eighteenth century had the most effective civil service in the world. It was unique in its capacity to deal with large-sale environmental events and to relieve famine...

https://jacobin.com/2018/10/mike-davis-late-victorian-holocausts-famine-mao-stalin

#ChineseEconomy #MikeDavis on #China Pre- #OpiumWar #OpiumTrade #ChinaTrade

Mike Davis on the Crimes of Socialism and Capitalism

We’ve heard for decades that socialism has a body count. But how does it compare to capitalism? Mike Davis discusses Stalin, Mao, and the staggering holocausts of capitalism’s nineteenth-century heyday.

Show threadbs2Feb 7, 2024
> Thomas Perkins invested in mills in Newton, an iron manufacturing plant in Vermont and what some historians say was the country's first railroad. It ran from the Quincy Quarry into Boston. Another Perkins' nephew, #JohnMurrayForbes, invested his opium profits in steamships, mines and railroads that would eventually cross the country...
#RailroadBarons #OpiumBarons #Forbes #OpiumTrade
bs2Feb 7, 2024
>.. not everyone struck it rich trading in opium. It was a competitive, highly volatile market. But those who worked for Perkins and a few other firms became the city's elite — otherwise known as #BostonBrahmins The Cabots, Cushings, Welds, #Delanos (the grandfather of #FranklinDelanoRoosevelt) and #Forbes all built fortunes on #opium.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31/opium-boston-history
#OpiumTrade link from #SmokeAndAshes endnotes by #AmitavGhosh #NorthEasternUpperCrust
How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston | WBUR News

In a city steeped in history, very few residents understand the powerful legacy of opium money.

WBUR
Show threadbs2Feb 7, 2024

> 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.’

#Trocki #CarlTrocki #OpiumAndEmpire #ColonialSystem #OpiumTrade #TotalitarianOpium