The rise of modernity may have always been associated with the industrial revolution. But ask Amitav Ghosh, author of the Ibis trilogy and Jnanpith award winner, and he may tell you a piece of history in which India, China and the imperialistic nations played a crucial role.
“The fundamental dynamic of contestation and competition between China and the anglosphere has basically been the fundamental driver of modernity,” he says.
Mr. Ghosh was speaking at the launch of his new book Smoke and Ashes at the Bangalore International Centre.
Smoke and Ashes looks at how the British manufactured opium trade for its own survival and prosperity, and left countries like China and India destructively impacted in the process.
Talking about the book Mr. Ghosh unfurled some fascinating excerpts from history.
The non-human presences
“The book is about two non-human presences which have, to some fairly important degree, shaped not just the Indian history, but the history of the world,” he said.
The first of these, he says, is the tea plant. The history of tea begins in China and by the early 1700s Britain directly imported tea from China. The British tea trade was the exclusive monopoly of the British East India Company, and nobody in the Indian Ocean, Europe, Atlantic, and the Americas was allowed to trade tea directly with China.
“They would sell tea in America for a huge markup,” Mr. Ghosh noted.
He explained how this agricultural commodity sustained not just the East India Company, but also the British government.
“The tax on tea was often almost as much as 100% through much of the 18th and 19th centuries. Chinese charged an export charge of only 10%. The British tax would go up from 100 to 150%. This tax accounted for nearly a tenth of Britain’s revenue,” he said.
“It earned the British government as much as all property, land, and income taxes put together. So vast was this sum that it could pay for all the public works, salaries of all government servants, all expenses related to law justice and so on.”
Cover page of the book Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh. | Photo Credit: HANDOUT E MAIL
Enter opium
As the tea trade with China continued, Britain started facing a problem. The Chinese would accept payment for tea only in silver. Another problem was that there was a huge imbalance between Britain’s imports from and exports to China. While the Chinese exports to Britain were vast, British exports to China were close to nil.
“In a curious way, it sort of mirrors what we see today. Look at the US trade deficits with China today. Or India’s trade deficits with China,” Mr Ghosh said. “The Chinese self-sufficiency troubled Europeans. Historians have suggested that the British saw in the Chinese the possibility of a rival master race.”
This brought in the second commodity that was crucial in shaping the history of the world – opium.
Across the Indian Ocean there used to be a small amount of opium trade, and the use of opium across Asia surged during the times of Ottoman and Mughal empires. Mr. Ghosh noted that the recreational use of opium began during the time of the Mongols.
It was then adopted by the gunpowder empires – the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids. Emperors, kings, and elites started using it for recreation and the list included Rajputs and Mughal emperors, said Mr. Ghosh.
China too used to import small amounts of medicinal opium. The British saw an opportunity in this.
In the 17th century the opium trade was still small and only about 4,000 chests of opium were produced. The main centre of production was the area around Patna.
A tsunami of opium
In the 1760s the British won big battles like Plassey and Buxar. Buxar was a turning point as it handed over to the British the opium-producing region. The British soon shut out the French and the Dutch and declared a monopoly over opium production. They established a large factory for opium in Ghazipur, where Ghosh’s novel ‘Sea of Poppies’ also begin.
“The Ghazipur factory is still there. It has been the longest-lasting industrial enterprise in India,” Mr. Ghosh quipped.
The opium department, in Mr. Ghosh’s words, ran a kingdom within an empire all the way from Purvanchal to the east of Uttar Pradesh. Opium agents lived in palatial mansions.
The opium production which did not even amount to a gram per capita of the Indian population in 1771, increased by great multiples by 1831-40 for trade with China. Vast tracks of land in India were now producing opium. While the British held the monopoly in eastern India, in the west it was largely under the control of various princely states.
“Between 1795 and 1840, the Chinese were facing a tsunami of opium,” Mr. Ghosh said concluding his presentation.
Multiple histories
Ramachandra Guha, who was in conversation with Mr. Ghosh at the event, noted that the book was not about just one, but multiple histories which are political, economic, military, social, cultural, and even botanical histories. He also pointed out the irony that while China and India are two countries or civilizations that were at the heart of the story, typically, the Indian literate classes looked to the West for influence and inspiration, but remained utterly disinterested in China.
Mr. Ghosh echoed similar sentiments.
“Our policymaking and thinking are so much dominated by the Hindi heartland and they have the same kind of dismal response to China as they have towards North East India,” he said.
Mr. Guha also noted that the book threw light on the comparative history of two great Indian cities – Kolkata and Mumbai – both of which saw the opium trade, but not entirely in a similar fashion.
The opium production in eastern India was controlled by the East India Company and its opium department which ran a draconian regime that employed a paramilitary force including armies of spies and enforcers, which Mr. Ghosh observed, was a fairly destructive social model. Anybody who even walked past the opium fields was subjected to surveillance and peasants were forced to produce opium well below cost, even in seasons of famine.
“There’s a reason why the 1857 riots started in this region. The first institutions targeted were the opium institutions,” Mr. Ghosh said.
In Western India, however, it was different and this difference was political. Marathas put up stiff resistance to the British and even after the British won the Battle of Assaye in 1803, they had to continue negotiations with the principalities.
“These principalities were able to provide cover through the mercantile networks of the regions which thereafter began to ship opium to China on a very large scale through (then) Bombay…It took a long time for the British to shut down these smuggling routes; In fact, they invaded Sindh because a lot of opium was going through Karachi. Once the opium trade started it became Bombay’s lifeline,” Mr. Ghosh said.
The non-humanisation of trade
Mr. Ghosh also drew parallels between the 17th and 18th centuries European enlightenment and climate denial today.
“With the wake of European enlightenment, a new kind of thinking emerged where abstractions of various kinds were invented to remove human agency. For example, Europeans even as they were instrumental in the extermination of millions of Native Americans blamed it on nature, pathogens, and the racial composition of the natives. This is similar to climate denial today,” he said.
By the late 18th century Addam Smith’s ideas of free market which argued that the market created a balance between supply and demand helped the British traders justify their actions without any ethical constraints. The British argument that they were simply catering to the demand was fundamentally wrong in the case of opium as the supply of it engineered a demand.
“The real innovation of the ideology of free trade is to destroy the notion that there should be any kind of ethical constraint,” Mr. Ghosh observed.
While China’s enormous decline had to do a lot with opium, he noted that it has been the only country that managed to successfully combat mass addiction.
“Today when you look at what’s happening in America, in uncanny degrees it mirrors what happened in China in the 19th century. Opioids are the leading cause of death in America and have killed more people in America than World War-2 did,” he said.
“I think we are seeing an enormous geopolitical upheaval across the Eurasian landmass... This is a time of extreme geopolitical instability. This time it’s happening in conjunction with multiple other crises - biodiversity loss, climate change, mass migrations, political instability of various kinds… I don’t think we’ve ever confronted a future as dark as this.”
Published - July 25, 2023 09:00 am IST
