Opium’s Long Shadow

Opium’s Long Shadow

Author: Steffen Rimner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-11-12

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674976304

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The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I. Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage. The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.


Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia

Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia

Author: A. Wright

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-11-21

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1137317604

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This study investigates the connections between opium policy and imperialism in Burma. It examines what influenced the imperial regime's opium policy decisions, such as racial ideologies, the necessity of articulating a convincing rationale for British governance, and Burma's position in multiple imperial and transnational networks.


The Chinese and Opium under the Republic

The Chinese and Opium under the Republic

Author: Alan Baumler

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0791480755

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In the nineteenth century, opium smoking was common throughout China and regarded as a vice no different from any other: pleasurable, potentially dangerous, but not a threat to destroy the nation and the race, and often profitable to the state and individuals. Once Western concepts of addiction came to China in the twentieth century, however, opium came to be seen as a problem "worse than floods and wild beasts." In this book, Alan Baumler examines how Chinese reformers convinced the people and the state that eliminating opium was one of the crucial tasks facing the new Chinese nation. He analyzes the process by which the government borrowed international models of drug control and modern ideas of citizenship and combined them into a program that successfully transformed opium from a major part of China's political economy to an ordinary social problem.


Crusaders Against Opium

Crusaders Against Opium

Author: Kathleen L. Lodwick

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0813181437

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Opium addiction in China during the closing decades of the Ch'ing dynasty afflicted all segments of society. From government officials to farmers, the population fell prey to the effects of the drug. Some provinces reported addiction rates as high as eighty percent. With the birth of Chinese nationalism, reformers—missionaries who had witnessed the effects of opium on Chinese society, students who had studied abroad and returned to their native land with broader perspectives, families who had lost all through the addiction of a loved one, doctors who had firsthand knowledge that opium use led only to death—cried out against the drug. Even though many were convinced that opium use had sapped the strength of China, ending the use of the drug was a complicated problem. Opium trade financed the colonial government of India, and imports amounted to many tons annually. Domestic poppies were also cultivated as source of income. Kathleen Lodwick examines the intersecting efforts of Protestant missionaries, particularly medical doctors, who had long denounced opium use, the British Royal Commission on Opium, which was decidedly pro-opium, the U.S. Philippine Commission, which denounced not only the trade but the Chinese people, and the British officials who finally undertook the task of ending the importation of opium to China. China kept few records on the amount of drug use or its effects. Missionary medical doctors conducted the first scientific survey on the effects of the drug, and their findings provided clear evidence of its perniciousness. Such evidence could not be ignored, whatever the fortunes involved, and missionaries conducted a campaign of education and awareness in China and abroad. As a result of their efforts, China and Britain entered into a treaty that called for all opium trade to cease by 1917, and both governments as well as the missionaries become immediately active toward that end. The suppression campaign was among the most successful of the late Ch'ing reforms. Lodwick tells a fascinating story of imperial exploitation and of a strain of honest crusaders who sought to right some of the wrongs their own nation was perpetrating. This book represents a strong argument against legalization of addictive drugs, a topic being discussed today in the United States as a solution to the societal problems our own drug use has caused.


Opium’s Orphans

Opium’s Orphans

Author: P. E. Caquet

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2022-07-06

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1789145597

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Upending all we know about the war on drugs, a history of the anti-narcotics movement’s origins, evolution, and questionable effectiveness. Opium’s Orphans is the first full history of drug prohibition and the “war on drugs.” A no-holds-barred but balanced account, it shows that drug suppression was born of historical accident, not rational design. The war on drugs did not originate in Europe or the United States, and even less with President Nixon, but in China. Two Opium Wars followed by Western attempts to atone for them gave birth to an anti-narcotics order that has come to span the globe. But has the war on drugs succeeded? As opioid deaths and cartel violence run rampant, contestation becomes more vocal, and marijuana is slated for legalization, Opium's Orphans proposes that it is time to go back to the drawing board.


Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire

Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire

Author: Paul C. Winther

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2005-06-14

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 9780739112748

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A fascinating and intricately woven tale of opium trade, evangelism, scientific discovery and political intrigue, Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium and British Rule in India 1756-1895 documents the contribution of a medical misconception to the preservation of British Rule in India. British authorities, desperate to shield the India-China Opium Trade from the escalating criticism of Christian evangelists and missionaries, endorsed the claim that opium prevented and cured malaria. This scientific validation of a vital source of revenue helped decimate the anti-opiumist movement, allowing the Indian government to vastly expand poppy cultivation in the name of both economic prosperity and public health. In this thoroughly researched and immensely readable history, author Paul Winther provides a revealing look at the complex and often unexpected negotiations that enable scientific authority to legitimize political and economic gain.