Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Part history, part memoir, part travelogue, Smoke and Ashes is the latest work by acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh. Grounded in the extensive research he conducted in writing his extraordinary Ibis Trilogy, this new history of opium traces the story of the drug from its earliest known use six thousand years ago to the twenty-first century. It’s an account of how opium transformed the life of Ghosh’s family and shaped the course of events in India, China, and the United States in numerous and often surprising ways. As he writes, “opium remains pharmacologically indispensable to this day. Simply put, opium is perhaps the oldest and most powerful medicine known to man.” And it continues to upend social norms and disrupt lives around the world in the guise of cocaine, fentanyl, and other artificial opioids as well as opium smoked in pipes.
A drug of historic impact
Ghosh views the poppy plant as an actor in its own right, wielding power over human affairs. Fueling the growth of the British Empire. Humbling the Qing Dynasty, and opening China to the demands of European and Japanese colonizers. Building the vast fortunes at the heart of the US and British economies. Driving eastern India into poverty while its west grew through free trade. And enslaving millions to its addictive allure. According to the World Health Organization, “Worldwide, an estimated 69 000 people die from opioid overdose each year.” And the US National Institutes of Health estimates that some sixteen million people worldwide are dependent on opioids.
But historically China took the brunt of the drug’s impact. “it is conservatively estimated,” Ghosh observes, “that by the early decades of the twentieth century, between 3 and 10 per cent of China’s population—possibly as many as 50 million people—were using opium. But other estimates suggest that the figure was at least double that and may even have been closer to 30 or 40 per cent of the population, possibly as many as 200 million people.” Only Mao’s revolution put a stop to the large-scale opium trade in China.
Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh (2023) pages ★★★★★
The largest commercial product of its time
Ghosh traces the evolution of poppy cultivation in India from its limited, medicinal use to its exploitation by the British Empire as a geopolitical weapon. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the British turned to the drug to help balance their trade with China, because their silver reserves were steadily draining into Qing coffers. The British wanted tea, porcelain, and other Chinese products. The Chinese wanted little from Britain. But the British were nothing if not determined to find a way to turn the tide. And since opium was the only product the British could offer, drug-trafficking became the answer to their problem.
After modest beginnings in the latter part of the eighteenth century, opium production gradually rose to surprising heights.”Production soared from four thousand chests per year in 1820 to over ninety thousand chests [each containing about one hundred forty pounds of opium] in the 1870s,” Ghosh writes, “making it ‘probably the largest commerce of the time in any single commodity.'” Two large opium-growing regions, one in eastern India, the other in the west, “thus became the two wellsprings of the rivers of opium that were flowing into China in the years before the First Opium War.”
This was colonialism at peak efficiency
The spread of opium as an addictive drug was almost entirely the work of the West. As Ghosh notes, “The only parts of Asia where opium was sponsored by ruling regimes were the colonies run by Europeans—the Dutch East Indies, India, the Philippines and, later, French Indo-China. In every part of Asia that enjoyed any kind of autonomy—Thailand, Japan and the kingdoms of Mandalay and Vietnam before their annexation—native rulers took early steps to ban or regulate opium.” In China, where the impact of opium was greatest, the British and the Americans were the principal drug pushers. But others, India included, were involved as well.
The profound impact of opium on India’s development
Most accounts of the nineteenth-century opium trade dwell on the drug’s impact on China, which was considerable. Millions of Chinese became addicted, perhaps eventually as many as forty percent of the population. But the impact on India was just as great, though in a very different way. “The divergent patterns of the opium industries of eastern and western India ‘laid the foundation for a much more dynamic economy in western India than in the east accounting for, to some extent, the current development of Bombay over Calcutta.'” In the East, the British controlled the drug’s cultivation. In the west, indigenous people were in control. “[W]hile Bombay prospered, Calcutta’s economy remained quintessentially colonial, structured around racial and communal hierarchies, and dependent on agricultural products like opium, jute and tea, all wrung out of the soil by underpaid and ill-used workers.” That pattern is vividly on display to this day.
Americans got into the act in a major way
Americans got into the opium trade at an early date. As Ghosh explains, “[T]he success of the British drug-running operation induced American merchants to look for other sources of opium, and they found a good one in Izmir (Smyrna), which was the outlet for Turkey’s principal opium-growing region in the interior. . . “
“By 1818 Americans were, by some estimates, smuggling as much as a third of all the opium consumed in China, thereby posing a major challenge to the East India Company’s domination of the market. Indeed, competition from Americans, and their Turkish opium, was one of the reasons why the Company ramped up its production in Bihar soon after.” And that spike in volume triggered the First Opium War when the Qing emperor finally moved to put a stop to the trade. It was also the source of some of the era’s greatest fortunes among merchants in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and other US cities. FDR’s grandfather was among them.
About the author
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1956 and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He received a BA and MA from the University of Delhi and a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. He is the author of ten novels, including the monumental Ibis series, and ten works of nonfiction. Ghosh has won numerous prestigious literary honors and four honorary doctorates from around the world, including the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India’s highest literary honor. It was the first time that prize had been awarded to a writer in the English language. Today, Ghosh divides his time between India and the United States, where he lives in Brooklyn. He is married to an American woman.
For related reading
I’ve reviewed all three books of Amitav Ghosh’s monumental Ibis Trilogy:
- Sea of Poppies (A superb historical novel about the opium trade)
- River of Smoke (A brilliant Indian novel about the First Opium War)
- Flood of Fire (An outstanding Indian novelist looks at the Opium War)
I’ve also reviewed two other novels by the author:
- The Hungry Tide (River dolphins, man-eating tigers, and a massive cyclone on the Bay of Bengal)
- The Glass Palace (A sweeping historical novel set in Burma)
For an excellent review of this book, see “The Opium Poppy Gets Star Billing in a New History” by Delia Falconer (New York Times, March 13, 2024).
This is one of 30 insightful books about China. It’s also one of the Good books about India, past and present that I’ve reviewed on this site.
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