The Opioid High of Empire

Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, Amitav Ghosh, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp., $32, February 2024; Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe, Sathnam Sanghera, PublicAffairs, 464 pp., $35, May 2024

Two new books, Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe and Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, provide an elegant riposte to this view, turning a spotlight on how the colonial past lives on years after the dismantling of the British imperial state. Together, they also render for a general readership what, contra Farage and Johnson, academic historians have long known: that British imperialism continues to influence our world today in manifold—and often unacknowledged—ways.

Sanghera’s is a follow-up to Empireland, his 2021 bestseller on how imperialism continues to shape Britain, where he was born to Punjabi parents in the 1970s and now works as a journalist. That book, he writes, exposed him to “thousands of abusive tweets and letters” and “hundreds of suggestions that I leave the country if I couldn’t learn to love British history.” The volume and intensity of this racist abuse was so great that it “ingrained itself into my daily existence, becoming as commonplace as my morning bowl of porridge,” he writes.

Fortunately for us, instead of retreating, Sanghera’s response was to widen his canvass, moving beyond his homefront to examine the British Empire’s impact on the wider world and assuming, in Empireworld, the role of a globe-trotting archeologist of imperialism, dusting off faraway colonial footprints. What he finds could fill a whole new British Museum.

Sanghera uncovers the empire’s distinctive stamp on buildings, language, systems of government, even varieties of flora and fauna. He examines the impact of, among other things, slavery, indentured labor, and the opium trade, and his catalog of imperial legacies is dense and damning.

Sanghera recounts how British colonialism was “largely responsible for the environmental destruction of the South Atlantic island of St Helena,” where colonists first felled trees for “cooking, heating and the distillation of booze” and then sealed the island’s environmental fate by importing invasive plants; how it resulted in “present-day New Zealand losing at least 60 per cent of its forests”; and how Britons’ taste for mahogany furniture and doors, “which were fashionable from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, and that visitors to National Trust houses coo over in the twenty-first century, led to near extinction of the trees in the West Indies.”

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Yet Empireworld is more than a catalog of what happened. Sanghera is an astute observer of the way the imperial past lives on, twisting attitudes in the present. Take Barbados, where Sanghera was surprised to find no mention of slavery during a tour of a colonial mansion on a former plantation. The tour guide explained that one of the bathrooms did not have running water because the owners considered it an “unnecessary expense,” Sanghera writes, but the guide didn’t clarify that this was likely because enslaved people carried water for them.

That was just one of several elisions on the tour. Sanghera writes that it “felt as if the topic was being deliberately sidestepped.” The tourists who visited the plantation—mostly white, mostly British—simply “didn’t care,” the guide told Sanghera, and “are marvelling at the accomplishments of their ancestors.”

Politics shift, rulers change; centuries-old dynamics, reinforced with selective tellings of the past, are harder to displace. As Sanghera muses during one of his research trips: It “would be easier to take the ghee out of the masala omelettes I’ve become addicted to eating for breakfast in India.”

British ships destroy an enemy fleet in Canton curing the First Opium War, circa 1841.Dea Picture Library/via Getty Images

The story, this time, begins with tea. Nineteenth-century Britain, having acquired a taste for the Chinese brew, faced an economic conundrum. It wanted tea, lots of it, but China was largely uninterested in British goods. This resulted in a trade imbalance, with huge amounts of money flowing from Britain to China. Imperial administrators wanted to reverse this tide in the British exchequer’s favor, so they sought to increase the flow of exports to China from Britain’s Indian colonies. Opium was the centerpiece of this economic offensive. The opium trade already existed, but European colonizers expanded it by an “order of magnitude,” Ghosh writes.

A series of drawings from 1882 show scenes from an opium factory in Patna, India: the balling room, the drying room, and the stacking room.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Under the British, opium production in India was transformed into a giant state monopoly, one propped up by what Ghosh calls “self-exculpatory” myths. Although China had banned the addictive drug by the late 1700s, Britain justified the trade by claiming that “non-white people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity,” he writes. British colonizers also claimed that the trade was simply a successor to an earlier opium enterprise under the Mughals—one that, Ghosh writes, doesn’t appear to have existed.

As China sought to crack down on opium imports, the trade led to wars and, ultimately, “to immense profits for the British Empire for well over a hundred years,” Ghosh writes. Britain’s victory in the mid-19th-century Opium Wars brought the empire control of Hong Kong, compensation for destroyed opium, and the forced legalization of the opium trade in China. Profits also flowed across the pond, as American capitalists, cut off from trade with nearby British colonies following their War of Independence, started to import Turkish opium to China.

This trade, as Ghosh shows, had an outsized impact on today’s world, from the global drug trade to modern India’s economy, where some of today’s economic problems can be traced back to the British opium monopoly. The Indian states where opium production was centered were rapaciously exploited by colonial officials, and they remain among the poorest in the nation today. Furthermore, he writes, many “of the cities that are now pillars of the modern globalised economy—Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai—were initially sustained by opium.”

An Indian police officer destroys poppy flowers being grown for opium production in Jharkhand, India, on Feb. 6, 2017. Sanjib Dutta/AFP via Getty Images

They also do more than chronicle. “Britain cannot hope to have a productive future in the world without acknowledging what it did to the world in the first place,” Sanghera writes. This doesn’t mean grappling with reductive questions of the sort implied by Farage and Johnson. Indeed, asking whether the empire was good or bad, he writes, is “as inane and pointless as asking whether the world’s weather has been good or bad over the last 350 years.” Instead, Sanghera calls for a much more nuanced view of Britain’s imperial history. For him, this entails filling the yawning gap in Westerners’ understanding about the empire and interrogating “some of the common claims and controversies about British imperial influence.”

Ghosh, long concerned about our unfolding climate catastrophe—for which Foreign Policy named him a Global Thinker in 2019—sounds a broader alarm about humanity’s limits in constraining the forces it unleashes. “There is no better example of this than the story of the opium poppy,” he writes. “It is at once a cautionary tale about human hubris, and a lesson about humanity’s limits and frailties.”

Both Ghosh and Sanghera understand, as Carr also argued in the 1960s, that “the past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present; and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past.” For Carr, the past and present were in constant dialogue, and the function of history was to “enable man to understand the society of the past, and to increase his mastery over the society of the present.” Empireworld and Smoke and Ashes fulfill this function brilliantly, looking back at the colonial past not simply to draw up a balance sheet of what happened but to understand the present and, hopefully, reimagine our shared futures.