
Opium, Empire, and India - Hooke
https://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/opium-empire-and-india-part-i/
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atxcrab
This might be interesting to readers : ibis trilogy from amithav ghosh
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_trilogy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_trilogy)

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miraj
it sure is a great historical fiction! in another HN thread I too suggested
this for readers interested in drug trade during colonial India.

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ultimoo
Having never tried any hard drugs or the mentioned concoctions, pardon my
basic question -- what effects does consuming opium have? Is it like consuming
modern day heroin? Does it imitate what people feel after smoking pot? Just
trying to understand why people consumed it -- the article mentions pain
relieving uses as well as 'taking the edge off' uses.

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mtdewcmu
"Narcotic" means numbing, and that's an accurate description IMO. Reports of
euphoria are exaggerated. It feels good if you are feeling pain or malaise and
it takes the pain or malaise away. Otherwise it doesn't feel like much.

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fragsworth
> Reports of euphoria are exaggerated.

No, they aren't. It depends a lot on the person, the specific narcotic, and
the quantity taken. Some (most in my experience) people feel intense euphoria,
others don't.

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mtdewcmu
The "euphoria" is situational. It's like alcohol. Drinking alone is usually
not much fun.

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pruthvishetty
Surprised not to see a mention of the Tatas here.

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gjkood
Can you shed some more light on why the Tatas should be mentioned in the
article?

As far as I can tell from Part 1 of the article which is posted, the
discussion is more of society's use of Opium through the latter part of the
millennia. It doesn't go into any specific purveyor of opium products except
for the regulation and subsequent clandestine production after prohibition.

> By Regulation XIII of 1816, opium cultivation was legalised in Bengal under
> the supervision of the Commercial Resident of Rungpore. The control of the
> Opium Department went from the Board of Revenue in the Customs, Salt and the
> Opium Departments by the Regulation IV of 1819. In 1850, by Act XLIV, the
> Customs, Salt and Opium Board was merged in the Board of Revenue at
> Calcutta. In 1797, prohibition was imposed on the private cultivation of
> poppy in Bengal proper and in Behar division of the province. It was then
> that the attention of the Government proper was being met by ‘systematic
> smuggling and clandestine production’

I am really curious about the Tata family role in this that you allude to.
Please elaborate.

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clock_tower
From your tone, it sounds like this is a known controversy in India. Could you
elaborate?

I know nothing about the Tatas' origin, although it's hard to miss the
importance of the modern Tata Group. Wikipedia says that the family fortune
was founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who had some wealth from his father
Nusserwanji and parleyed it, through trade, into enough capital to recondition
a cotton mill.

Are you saying that Jamsetji's trading company dealt in opium? That his
father's business was involved in it? Or even both? If so, looking at things
from a United States perspective, I'd find that a little heartening. I'd
always seen the opium trade as a matter of pumping money from undeveloped
China to already-rich London and Boston; if there was going to be an opium-
for-silver trade regardless, at least some of the silver went to somewhere
else in need of capital.

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douche
> I'd always seen the opium trade as a matter of pumping money from
> undeveloped China to already-rich London and Boston;

Like most things, it's a little more complicated than the packaged narrative.
Prior to the introduction of opium to the Canton trade, pretty much all of the
goods that were imported from China by foreigners were paid for with silver -
mostly from Mexico and Potosi or Japan - as there was very little that
Europeans could find or produce that would sell in China's largely self-
sufficient economy[1]. By the late 1700s, Britain, Portugal and the
Netherlands were shipping millions of silver Dollars into Canton for silks and
tea and such every year. China vacuumed up so much of the world's silver
supply that it severely distorted the exchange rates in the Qing bimetallic
currency system. Up until the opium trade got going, China had a massive,
massive trade surplus. A lot of that wealth did get squandered - probably the
poster child would be Heshen[2], a Manchu official that siphoned off a fortune
estimated at fifteen times the annual tax revenue of the Qing Empire, or Wu
Bingjian - one of the primary Chinese merchants in the Cohong system, who was
so wealthy he personally contributed a third of the indemnity stipulated in
the Treaty of Nanking[3].

[1] I don't have a link, but it is hilarious reading some of the early
official records of the English East India company, and their utter inability
to find anyone who would buy the woolens they initially tried shipping as
cargo.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen#Fall_of_Heshen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen#Fall_of_Heshen)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howqua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howqua)

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cubano
Yes...this is a pretty concise history of the situation, but I feel it needs
at least a passing mention of one of the "evilest" government-sponsored wars
in the history of mankind, the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century.

What made these particular acts of aggression so odious was, as I discovered
in shock several years ago, they were not fought for the obvious reasons you
would think; that the Chinese has opium and the British sent some military to
take it from them. The reality is much more hideous then that.

As the previous poster mentioned, the British had little the Chinese wanted to
trade for, and the Brits wanted Chinese tea in huge quantities. What the
British eventually settled on was Afghanistan opium, which the Chinese had a
taste for. The problem started when the Chinese leaders, seeing the
destruction that opium addiction was doing to their people, tried to stop the
trade of opium and reign in the millions of ruined lives it was causing.

The British responded, rather poorly I'd say, by going to war with the Chinese
_to force them to continue to trade the opium for the tea and thusly keep
their people enslaved to the drug_. It's a rather unbelievable premise for
going to war actually, but in 1839 that's what they did.

They won, thus insuring several more generations of totally ruined Chinese
addicts. I always think that this pretty much represents government and big
business working in tandem at its most evil worse.

