#opiumtrade — Public Fediverse posts

> 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

> ".. 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 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

_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

> 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

>.. 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

> What the official monopolies mainly succeeded in doing was actually increase the profits that colonial regimes reaped from opium. As one Dutch official frankly admitted: ‘In the system of the Opiumregie, there is no place to reduce the quantities which could be sold; it is necessary to help every buyer.’
#OpiumTrade #AmitavGhosh #SmokeAndAshes