In ”Smoke and Ashes,” Amitav Ghosh takes the reader through a broad, yet deeply personal exploration of opium’s history, its trade and consumption, as well as how it shapes the world we live in today. 

There are a lot of books about opium. Nearly all of these books document a narrow range of times, places, and practices that stand out within the global history of this uniquely harmful drug. One can learn a great deal from this scholarship: the history of the British East India Company and opium production in India, how Chinese merchants came to run opium tax farms in Southeast Asia, and how the gentry-led prohibition movement ultimately failed to eradicate the drug’s circulation in early twentieth-century China. But until the arrival of Amitav Ghosh’s new book, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, there has been nothing that even approaches a wholistic approach to opium’s modern history.

Smoke and Ashes is a book about everything. It covers opium’s production, distribution, and consumption. It addresses how the drug’s sale and use impacted politics, culture, and finance in China, India, Southeast Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It explains the origins of the modern opium business and traces out continuities through the twentieth century, the Sackler family, and the contemporary American opiate epidemic. It is an ambitious and useful book, and a good read.

Ghosh has scholarly credentials, reflected in the book’s meticulous and capacious notes, but he approaches the task as a seasoned storyteller. The narrative that he offers is personal, rooted firmly in his own experience. For an author who grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata), what is China? What does the opium trade mean in India, where the drug was grown, as compared to China, where it was consumed? If the same commodity had such decisive and yet different impacts on the modern history of these two massive population centres, would it make sense to consider opium as a historical agent in its own right? What might that inquiry look like? These are the questions the book begins with, and they provide a blueprint for the chapters that follow.

Smoke and Ashes proceeds along a roughly geographical and chronological framework, a story that starts in India and culminates in China. The early chapters on India are particularly rich, taking us first through political and financial history before turning to culture and society. We learn how the modern opium trade emerged from a competition between the Dutch and British East India Companies in the eighteenth century, and how the British Opium Department and its policing agencies worked to systematise the production of the drug in Bengal and protect revenue in a context where impoverished farmers were forced to produce this conspicuously lucrative crop at a loss. George Orwell, “the son of an opium agent and an imperial police officer himself,” features prominently here as a vehicle for Ghosh to underscore the terrifying impact that opium was having on colonial governance.

Opium helped create modern patterns of policing, control, and spin. By contrasting images of opium and opium production created by both British and Indian artists, he argues that the people who bought and sold opium worked with the colonial state to spin a web of “lies and dissimulation” around the opium trade. Next, a short but punchy chapter entitled “Family Story” opens a window into the vicissitudes of opium’s impact on India, showing how Ghosh’s own family history was shaped directly and indirectly by the drug. Chapters Nine and Ten round out our trip through India by explaining the emergence of Malwa as alternative opium production site to the southwest of Bengal, a branch of trade run by Hindu entrepreneurs inland and then exported through port of Bombay (now Mumbai) by diasporic merchants like the Parsis, Armenians, and Iraqi Jews.

We depart India with a chapter about these diasporic networks, considered together with the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia, both conspicuous in the global history of opium trading. Ghosh argues that these groups rose to success through their manipulation of vital information networks that were otherwise inaccessible to the British and shows how they came to occupy within the imperial project “a dual role, of collusion and subversion.” The conclusion of this chapter offers a forceful reconsideration of “Free Trade” as a useful concept for understanding the British Empire, an entity that funded itself in India by monopolising the production of opium, and in the Straits Settlements by monopolising the drug’s distribution. “It wasn’t Free Trade or the autonomous laws of the market that laid the foundations of globalised economy,” he writes, “it was a monopolistic trade in a drug produced under colonial auspices by poor Asian farmers, a substance that creates addiction, the very negation of freedom.”

Ghosh proceeds from this argument to America, where the author has lived much of his adult life and where opium’s nineteenth century legacy has been largely buried and overlooked. We learn how America was physically shaped by opium profits: how the dams and railways that Edison designed and built in the Adirondack region, for example, were made possible by an earlier generation’s accumulation of opium capital in China. Here, too, Ghosh sees a chance to rebut the mythology of Free Trade, arguing that the Americans who went to China to do business in the early nineteenth century had “the advantages of race, family, class, and education,” and that the opium fortunes they returned home with were built and protected “by the structures of kinship, class and race.” These advantages, he notes, also allowed this group to escape the stigma associated with drug peddling.

As the book nears its conclusion we are taken, finally, to China. Here is where opium’s history has been felt most acutely, where opium occupies a most important space in modern history classes, and in the mythologies of the nation. Having set out to understand what China and opium might mean to a person from India, Ghosh addresses the question here with a fascinatingly dense argument about India’s modern cosmopolitan identity. He shows the surprising ways in which India was transformed through its opium-induced connection to the port of Guangzhou, and argues that Guangzhou served as an Asian, non-Western, site for the development of a pan-Asian modernism.

The book’s core contribution, beyond its breadth, is a long-developing and methodologically important argument about opium as a historical agent. Ghosh introduces the argument in chapter two, builds on this foundation throughout the body chapters, and returns to it at the end of the book. In short, the argument is that opium is a uniquely addictive, profitable, and physically-degenerative commodity, incomparable in this regard to alcohol, cannabis, or anything else. Opium’s hyper-addictive quality means that people will consume however much is produced. In this way, opium has been “in its own right, a force in history.”

“It is almost,” he warns, “as if the elders of the plant kingdom, having concluded that homo sapiens was too dangerous an animal to be allowed to survive, had given humankind a gift that they knew would be used by the most ruthless and powerful of the species to build economic systems that would slowly, inexorably, bring about the end of their civilisations.” The implications are chilling.

This is a review of Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). ISBN: 9780374602925

Peter Thilly is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is also the author of ”The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China” and ”Opium’s Reverse Course: A Story of Shifting Winds”

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.