Can we prevent addictive drugs being consumed? Yes. We can also prevent cannibalism, incest, and, worst of all, the smoking of cigarettes. This is because beating, torture, and killing are highly effective in eliminating a wide range of behaviours. On the other hand, we may refuse to do any of these things because it would involve trouble and expense and there is no 'external effect'- i.e. we receive no substantial cost and forego no benefit, outside the market, from the activity in question.
The fact is drugs are a gross substitute for things which may be yet more harmful. Anyway, people can always top themselves. Thus, the proper way to look at addictive substances which people don't really want to see disappear is legalization and taxation. The Chinese fought two futile 'Opium wars'. Once they legalized and taxed opium production they produced way more of the stuff than India. By 1905, their output was 35, 000 tons- i.e. ten times that of India. Between 1934 and 1937 India produced 6.7 percent of the world supply of raw opium; 65.4 percent was produced in China. This meant the Chinese could use the tax revenue from opium to pay for soldiers to put down rebellions and strengthen their Army. At a later point, there was a time when 40 percent of the Communist revenue in their war-effort came from Opium. The little poppy enabled Mao's Party to triumph.
No doubt, it is in the interest of the Chinese Government to pretend the Opium wars represented unspeakable evil and, equally indubitably, that it is the duty of a Bengali buddhijivi to repeat such lies, but the fact is, the KMT and the Japanese and the Hong Kong government all depended on the opium tax. Addiction, it seems, can expand the tax base and permit better, if not governance, then the ability to kill the invader or the rival for power. A salt tax is all very well, but there's a limit to the amount of salt you can eat. It helps if a population rising above subsistence takes to ciggies and beer and other stuff you can tax so as to increase State capacity.
On Amazon webpage for 'Opium's hidden histories' I read-
When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy ten years ago, he
must have known at least as much as I do about the Opium trade. Yet, he
was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium.
Most Indians of my generation knew that the Tatas had sold opium to China. So had various other merchants based on the West coast of India who had access to smuggled 'Malwa' opium which was sent through Portuguese ports to China. Many prominent 'bhadralok' families of Bengal as well as Kayasth and Khattri families in Bihar and elsewhere had held posts in the Opium Bureau or had profited from that trade in other ways. But this was also true of indigo or cotton during the Civil War and various other commodities at different times.
Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story.
Opium was used in the treatment of cholera and dysentery. I suppose few of us have ancestors who did not require opiates at one time or another. The bhadralok buddhijivis of Bengal, however, are likely to have an ancestor directly involved in administering the Opium monopoly or profiting by its trade.
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large.
This is nonsense. The discovery of tobacco in the New World meant that the practice of opium smoking became more addictive and accessible to the poorer classes. It appears the Portuguese introduced the practice which the Chinese refined. India was already a high quality opium exporter but China had the bigger market. What is noteworthy is that those nations which mastered oceanic, globe-girdling, transport rose at the expense of Empires which had turned their backs on the Sea. Japan, South Korea and now China are big ship-building countries. They have understood that imitating what the West did to rise up will enable them to rise yet higher.
As Britain rose in affluence thanks to maritime trade as well as improved techniques of production at home, it imported vast quantities or Rum and Opium and Cotton and Silk and Tea and Sugar. But its traders also found new markets for these products. China supplied Tea in plenty and took Opium in exchange. Sadly, the Central Government wasn't getting its cut. Also, productivity tends to fall more if you get addicted to opium rather than tea or coffee. Britain and America and France fought 'Opium wars' to open up China to trade. But, they wanted to buy stuff from the industrious Chinese- some also wanted to convert them to Christianity- and didn't want the place to turn into a den of lethargic addicts. Once Japan, and then China, had more sensible, nationalistic, leaders they rose rapidly by taking the same path as the Western Europeans and Americans. They built factories and ships to transport their produce around the world. There is a lesson here. What is transformative is not Opium. It isn't even Slavery or Genocide. Nor is it Capitalism or Greed. It is the 'gains from trade' and the discovery of new commodities or new techniques to produce commodities.
The trade was engineered by the British Empire,
It pre-existed it. It is likely that the Portuguese were the first to smoke opium and sell it for that purpose in South China. England was initially purely an importer of opium from India.
What was distinctive about John Company was that it did quality control and restricted supply such that opium from both directly controlled territory as well as Princely India was higher grade and commanded a premium over the inferior, Turkish origin, opium their American competitors were supplying. This is an example of how a centralized marketing board, or monopoly, can make everybody down the supply chain better off. The Brits didn't have a big impact on most parts of India but, thanks to Opium and Indigo, there was a brief period when Bengal was 'golden' for the bhadralok. Ghosh, perhaps atavistically, hopes to cash in on the thing once again.
which exported Indian opium to sell to China to redress their great trade imbalance,
The Chinese had turned opium smoking into a fine art. The Brits- philistines that they are- turned the sacred rites of the tea ceremony into a petty bourgeois dissipation. But, Britain had plenty of silver with which it could buy what it liked. John Company needed the revenue from Opium to finance its administration of India- one which bhadralok buddhijivis like Roy & Tagore were greatly in favour of. Why? The alternative was Muslim rule.
and its revenues were essential to the empire’s financial survival.
No. John Company would have found other markets, or other commodities to trade in, if the Chinese Emperor had been strong enough to enforce the long standing ban on opium smoking. Alternatively, they could have reversed the Permanent Settlement from which the bhadralok profited and taxed them a lot more in return for protecting them from Muslim daggers.
In any case, the fact is, the Brits brought in some Chinese people to grow tea in Assam. Soon, the Indians couldn't get enough of it. Our current PM started off as a 'chai-wallah'.
Tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations,
which would simply have traded in something else if the Chinese government had been able to crack down on opium use. Incidentally, it was a Chinese merchant, not an American or a Britisher who became the richest man in the world as a result of trade with the West.
of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.
This is silly. People who grew opium or who got others hooked on it did not get rich. Those who had the best ships and the smartest factors grew rich. But they would have got rich trading in some other commodity if the Chinese had decided to punish opium smoking.
Moving deftly between horticultural histories,
that of tobacco or the potato may be important. Opium- not so much.
the mythologies of capitalism,
are less interesting than the truth. The fact is governing a territory is itself an enterprise which requires capital. If revenues fall, there will be less governance and the territory may be lost. Taxes are 'the price of Civilization'. They pay for public defence, law and order, and perhaps some nice palaces for the ruler and some good enough mansions for his principal supporters.
and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism,
Whatever they were they ended before Amitav was born. Hong Kong, however, remained British till about 25 years ago. That is why people in Hong Kong are starving while people in Calcutta are wealthy.
in Smoke and Ashes Amitav Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe
That small plant was known to the Sumerians. It played no part in making 'our world'. Cod did. Western European fishermen had to sail farther and farther out into the Atlantic to catch the fish which would keep their families from starvation. This is the reason Portugal and the Atlantic coast of Western Europe rose up through globalized maritime commerce. In the process, they brought plants and animals and people from one place to another. Sadly, recent research reveals, some of those Western Europeans had penises. Penises cause RAPE! Why have they not been banned? Is it not because some of the wealthiest families in our Societies are descended from people who had penises? Isn't that the reason that ENVIRONMENT IS BEING RAPED! Globe is getting too warm due to excessive number of penises are constantly raping it. Only by seeing through Neo-Liberalism's 'smoke and mirrors' can we at last begin to delineate the genealogy of the smoke of the poppy as reflected in the mirror of the Subaltern.
Today, entire multiverse is teetering on edge of catastrophe due to continued existence of penises. Such organs can only be permitted to exist if they are used solely for purposes of LGBTQYX butt sex. Ghosh Babu may kindly mention this to Bannerjee Didi so that needful action can be taken.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment