From this review/interview:
Amitav Ghosh, the acclaimed 58-year-old Indian novelist, is describing his extraordinary Ibis trilogy which has just concluded with the publication of the equally stupendous Flood of Fire. A decade in the writing, this exciting, passionate and scathing account of the First Opium War deserves to stand as one of the outstanding achievements of 21st-century literature.
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In Ghosh’s telling, English merchants’ expansionist policy of selling opium, grown in India by near-slave labour, and sold in China where there was a vast illegal market, did not simply mark the foundations of the British Empire. It signalled a new form of global trade and politics, laying the foundations of outsourcing, migrant populations and truly international foreign relations – all driven by advances in military technology and realpolitik.
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“It’s strange that the world pays such little attention to the Opium Wars, but opium was perhaps the largest single trade of the 19th century. All the profits went to England. All the work was done by Indians. All the silver came from China which was consuming it. It was one of the most iniquitous things that has ever happened in the history of mankind.”
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“It was important for us to travel and see the world, and it has been very important for me. As Indians, we can never forget what happened to us in the 18th and 19th-century. It came about for us, as it did for China, because of our ignorance of the world. That must never be allowed to repeat itself.”
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For instance, as a way to understand what he called the current Anglo-American conception of economic development. “Britain saw these apparently empty continents and squeezed them of their resources, then presented this to the world as a desirable model of growth. Countries now can’t seize continents because there are no continents left – there are no resources left. That is the fundamental problem.”
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Ghosh’s entryway into Flood of Fire was Adam Smith’s conception of freemarket economics, which Britain realised by selling opium at vast profit to China in the late 18th century. The iniquity of the trade was highlighted in a famous diplomatic letter sent to Queen Victoria. High Commissioner Lin complained that in England the drug was prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity. While this is a slight exaggeration – opium use wouldn’t begin to be legally restricted until later in the 19th century – it is the sort of ironic imbalance that Ghosh exploits. “I realised this was the inaugural moment in the wars of what you might call Free Trade Imperialism. These merchants were the first generation of people for whom Adam Smith’s ideas were like a religion. They really thought they were laws of nature.”
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“The profit motive has always existed, nowhere more so than in China and India, but Adam Smith created the idea that the economy is separate from human society and driven by its own internal forces. For the merchants, the market was not subject to any ethical constraints. Nobody in America [today] would suggest that Colombia has a right to push drugs in their country. But this was exactly what the Free Trade Fundamentalists were saying back then.” In this, opium was uniquely suited to Smith’s purposes. “The whole point about capitalism is to try to persuade people to buy things that they don’t need,” Ghosh argues. “It necessarily began with addictive substances. Tobacco, rum, tea, opium.”
Nevertheless, the drug posed moral questions for all but the most sociopathic free marketeers. Ghosh cites Warren Delano, grandfather of future American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, for seven years from 1823, an opium trader in Canton. In a letter, Delano accepted that he could not defend the China trade on moral grounds, but could do so in economic terms “as a merchant I insist it has been ... fair, honourable and legitimate”.
Ghosh views the market’s triumph over morality with unmistakable antipathy. “As we know, behind every great fortune lies a crime. That’s the remarkable thing about traders. When they eventually settle down they completely reinvent themselves as philanthropists or religious people. This is as true of the Indians as it is of the Americans and the Englishmen. Half the public institutions of Bombay were founded by people who made enormous sums of money in the China trade. If you look at the east coast of America, many of the universities and museums were really funded by opium.”
