What is the link between opium, imperialism and capitalism? Was the British Empire built on opium? And what can the nineteenth-century drug trade tell us about the Asian heroin traffic of today? Carl A. Trocki answers all these questions in his fascinating history of the great imperial drug trade of the nineteenth century: the British-Indian opium trade. The book brings together for the first time nearly fifty years of scholarship and research on opium trafficking, addiction, and other studies on drugs, the economy and human society. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy raises provocative questions about the historical relationship between opium, capitalism and European imperialism in Asia. Opium needs to be considered in its role as an economic commodity, and seen in the context of other "drug'' trades, including sugar, tea, alcohol and tobacco. Trocki's evidence convincingly suggests that European imperialism, and the creation of a global economy, relied heavily on these great drug trades. All reoriented labor, land and capital in the service of commodity production and usually involved "industrial" modes of production. In order to serve these trades, systems of international exchange - such as shipping lines and banking - were brought into existence. They created the first great mass consumer markets, first in Europe and then, with opium, in Asia. Opium, Trocki argues, facilitated important elements in the European imperial advance through Asia, and was equally a fiscal support for virtually all of the new Asian states.
Abingdon, Oxon, UK; New York: Routledge, 1999. 224p.