-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy Carl A Trocki�1999 All rights reserved Routledge Taylor & Francis Group London and New York ISBN 0-415-21500-5 208 pps. --First Edition -- In-Print ----- An Excellant book. If one cares to understand today, one must try and understand the past. --"Without opium, there would be no empire"-- --Opium was the tool of the capitalist classes in transforming the peasantry and in monetizing their subsistence lifestyles. Opium created pools of capital and fed the institutions that accumulated it: the banking and financial systems, the insurance systems and the transportation and information infrastructures. Those structures and that economy have, in large part, been inherited by the successor nations of the region today.-- Om K ----- Introduction This book re-examines the British Indian opium trade to China and Southeast Asia. In the past half-century, much research has been done and many books and articles have been written on various aspects of the opium trade. Outside of David E. Owen's account, written in the 1930s, there have been few studies which look at the entire commerce. It is one aim of this study to provide an overview of the opium trade that would include much of the more recent literature on opium, the opium trade and drugs in general. Beyond this, the study seeks in particular to probe the role of the drug trade in laying the foundation for European colonial structures in Asia, both economic and administrative. The intention is to place opium in the same context with other important commercial enterprises which were also based on drugs, or drug-like products, including tobacco, alcohol and tea. So far as I am aware, this has not really been done before. The study is informed by a number of assumptions about the relationship between drugs and human society. The first of these is that drugs are a "natural" part of human life. It recognizes that since human life evolved we have regularly made use of certain naturally occurring chemical substances for their mind- or mood-altering properties. Almost every human culture has found a place for some drug, including opium. Their use has often been associated with some sort of religious practice, social ritual, or spirit medicine, not to mention everyday physical medicine. Whether it has been opium, cannabis, coca, tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, betel, kutch, or one of the many other vegetable products, human beings have regularly had recourse to some selection of them so as to "doctor" their bodies or their minds. Almost all of these substances can be considered, and have been placed, in the dangerous category. Inappropriate or excessive use of any of them may cause illness, physical or mental damage, addiction or even death. Most cultures have found ways to control the use of their native drugs, thus all human societies have their own "drug cultures." From a systemic point of view, I propose that drugs became social problems only when they were moved out of their "original" contexts to populations or nations which had not been habituated to their use, or when the availability, production or distribution of them was drastically changed. This, at least, is the historical process which I hope to demonstrate here. We have come to call such events "drug epidemics" or "drug plagues." They occur when a society is suddenly swept by a wave of use, and abuse, of' a newly introduced addictive drug. Large numbers of' people are affected and the phenomenon usually attracts considerable attention and comment from other sectors of society, who normally view it as a sign of social decay or even collapse. It is clear that many drugs are "dangerous." That is, they are poisons that call kill or at least seriously impair our health. Many possess the additional property of being addictive. Without being scientifically exact at this point, addiction can be defined as the process by which an individual develops a physiological or psychological dependence upon a chemical substance that is not otherwise a necessity of life. Addicts thus require a regular and often continually increasing supply of the substance. At some point where use of the drug becomes habitual, they usually suffer ill-health, loss of wealth, an apparent loss of "free will" and some even lose their lives. Drugs, nevertheless, offer psychological compensations and comforts that appear, at least for a time, to make all the ills they bring worthwhile. These attractions are so strong that today, despite fairly strict legal, moral and social sanctions, people are willing to risk fines, imprisonment and even execution to procure drugs for their own consumption or to supply them to others. It seems that there is one key ingredient necessary to create a true drug "epidemic." In addition to exotic introduction and changes in production, the commercialization of drug production, trade and marketing seem to have been crucial. This links these drugs with the development of capitalism. The commercialization of a drug has radically altered the established relationship between human society and a particular substance. This process has been associated with a number of fundamental transformations in human life, one of which has been the appearance of large plantations, or similar agricultural establishments, worked by some form of slave or unfree labor, where a drug is produced for sale at some distant location. The trade in such drugs usually results in some form of monopoly which not only centralizes the drug traffic, but also restructures much of the affiliated social and economic terrain in the process. In particular two major effects are the creation of mass markets and the generation of enormous, in fact unprecedented, cash flows. The existence of monopoly results in the concentrated accumulation of vast pools of wealth. The accumulations of wealth created by a succession of historic drug trades have been among the primary foundations of global capitalism and the modern nation-state itself. Indeed, it may be argued that the entire rise of the west, from 1500 to 1900, depended on a series of drug trades. This book looks at the long-term historical transformation of opium, from an exotic chemical largely used as a medicine or occasional narcotic to an intensively produced and widely marketed commodity. It traces the creation of a new and pernicious drug culture in Southeast Asia and China where opium came to be "smoked" by increasing numbers of users. There is an attempt to look at its importance not only in human terms, but also in the administrative and economic structures of India, Southeast Asia and China. In particular, the focus is on the relationship of the drug trade to the rise and fall of the European, especially the British, empire in Asia. In focusing on the British Empire, I wish to make indelibly clear the intimate historical link between the British enterprise in Asia-East-of-Suez and this phase of the international drug trade. Recent years have seen an upsurge of literature romanticizing the Raj, from Paul Scott's Raj Quartet to the novels of James G. Farrell and the virtual cottage industry of British books about Singapore before and during the Pacific War. Some glorify the endeavor, others find reason to criticize the people or the age, but most studiously avoid the topic of opium, unless to gloss over it as an "oriental" vice. While it is true that Asians used the drug, it is also true that Europeans became the most prominent producers and purveyors. Foremost among them were the British East India Company, its successor the British colonial government of India, and the community of British merchants who laid the economic foundation of the imperial economy. I argue here that without the drug, there probably would have been no British Empire. Admittedly, this is difficult to prove, and I am sure that my contentions will find critics. Nevertheless, if we try to subtract opium income and opium profits from the Indian budgets, from the merchants' balance sheets, from the other colonial fiscal structures, I believe we need to ask how else the superstructures of the European enterprise would have been financed. There are a number of conclusions from the study. The first is that the nineteenth-century opium trade not only destroyed the integrity of social and political structures in China and Southeast Asia, but it also helped to build and to finance the creation of new and alternative structures. In Southeast Asia these were the colonial states, most of which were supported by opium revenues. In China, particularly after 1860, opium revenues became an important part of regional revenue regimes, which drew strength from the drug trade while the central government declined. Moreover, in the years following the collapse of the dynasty, opium became the fiscal mainstay of virtually all of the warlord and republican regimes that dominated China in the period before 1950. At the end of the nineteenth century opium was thoroughly embedded in the political economies of every Asian state east of Suez. If it was not grown locally and sold to the population, it was imported from some other place where it was grown for export. While it is difficult to argue intent, it is clear that the structure of European imperial control and the capitalist structures which were built upon it were intimately tied to opium. This book introduces the image of the "opium empire," a metaphor first offered by Joseph Conrad. It takes up the early history of opium and other "traditional drugs" such as tobacco and sugar and develops the paradigm of commercialized drug trades and ties that to the growth of European colonialism in the Americas and Asia in the second chapter. The third and fourth chapters look at the Asian opium trade of Britain, first as it grew in India and then as it affected Southeast Asia and China. The fifth and sixth chapters look at opium in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing not only on the spread of the opium trade but also on the evolving political economy of the drug as it came to affect Chinese political development. The seventh chapter focuses on the political economy of opium revenue farming systems in Southeast Asia, connecting them to the growth of colonial regimes and fiscal systems, while at the same time linking them to the growth of capitalist enterprises in the European-dominated territories. Chapter 8 reviews the international movements at the beginning of' the twentieth century to ban the traffic in narcotics and examines some of the repercussions of that development. This chapter also looks at the relationship between the nineteenth-century drug trades and the twentieth-century heroin traffic. An important theme here is the change in consciousness regarding the new drug cultures being created. This chapter also suggests a number of the lessons which the "Imperial drug trade," as Joshua Rowntree styled it, have to teach the west as it enters the twenty-first century. Throughout, the study is concerned with the links between drug trades, European colonial expansion, the creation of the global capitalist system and the creation of the modern state. Drug trades destabilized existing societies not merely because they destroyed individual human beings but also, and perhaps more importantly, because they have the power to undercut the existing political economy of any state. They have created new forms of capital; and they have redistributed wealth in radically new ways. As such, they have been the incubators of capitalism. Their production has enslaved or otherwise entrapped labor forces, their traffic has fed the exchange systems and the "brokers" who are the propagators of the system, and their distribution has lubricated the mass markets necessary for the establishment of capitalism. What sugar, alcohol and tobacco did for the Americas and Africa, opium did for Asia. In looking at modern-day anti-drug policies and comparing those policies with the attitudes and projects of the years before World War 1, there seems some cause for irony. Modern-day power holders may or may not realize that drug economies have been vital to the construction of the modern state; that they have been the stepping stones of the capitalist political economy. At the same time, nevertheless, they do realize that drugs, and more specifically drug economies, have the power to destroy or seriously undermine an existing political order. The question that we might continue to ponder, however, is whether the problem is in the drug or in the economy. pps. xi-xiv ===== With help from the American Central Intelligence Agency, the Opium Warlords of the Golden Triangle prospered during the global Cold War and the Asian hot wars in both Korea and Vietnam. So long as they were ostensibly anti-communist, the US supported them, thus the Guomindang military, the Shan warlords, the Thai generals, the Hmoung chiefs, and the South Vietnamese leaders all profited from regular American support and encouragement throughout the Vietnam War era. No small part of their profits came from the drug trades they controlled. When the Vietnam War ended and "native" warlords such as Khun Sa rose up to take the poppy fields from the likes of General Li Mi and Lo Sing Han, a new source of legitimization was found in Shan nationalism. The entire enterprise, however, continued to be a drug regime, now with the capability of transforming the raw opium into heroin, a commodity more readily transported and marketed. Opium thus created a succession of new political and economic orders in Asia during the past two centuries. These included the state of the East India Company itself, the new Malay polities of island Southeast Asia, the colonial states of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia and the warlord regimes of post-Qing China as well as the Guomindang and communist states that arose out of that milieu. At the same time, the economies of the entire region were radically reoriented, or perhaps "re-occidented" would be a more appropriate word. India's opium production was brought under western control while China's domestic economy was opened to the west. Southeast Asia was first opened to western traders and then to western control. With the migration of Chinese labor, Southeast Asian economies were transformed into commodity-producing regimes focused on exporting to the industrializing western Powers. Underlying all of this, opium rearranged the domestic economies and pushed them down the path of mass consumption, which together with mass production, typified the "modern" economic order. It is possible to suggest a hypothesis that mass consumption, as it exists in modern society, began with drug addiction. And, beyond that, addiction began with a drug-as-commodity. Something was necessary to prime the pump, as it were, to initiate the cycles of production, consumption and accumulation that we identify with capitalism. Opium was the catalyst of the consumer market, the money economy and even of capitalist production itself in nineteenth-century Asia. This is why it seems appropriate to use the image of Conrad's Patna as the symbol of the European empire in Asia. Whether it was British, Dutch French, Spanish, Portuguese or even American, the white man's domination of Asia rose and fell as a more-or-less unified enterprise. And, before the onset of wide-scale industrialism, it was always a "drug" enterprise beginning with spices and ending with opium. In 1900, as the industrial century opened, the rusting, decrepit Patna was gliding off into the silent sea to some uncertain demise, loaded with hapless Asians engaged in their own pilgrimage, and piloted, so long as it seemed secure, by a crew of weak, deluded and unreliable fools. The idealistic Englishmen, whom Conrad admired, believed they had made something great and glorious, which would last for ages. Conrad's message was that the reality of empire was far less uplifting. The parasites of the empire, as Conrad saw them, the self-serving Europeans, the Chinese, the Arabs, the "half-castes" and the corrupt Malays were the only ones who managed to profit. In the end, something quite different and extraordinary was created, something not even Conrad could have imagined. Opium was vital, both to the capitalist transformation of the local economies as well as to the finance of the colonial administrative structures which protected those economies. Opium was also important because it speeded those vital changes in the relations of production that were necessary for capitalist-style growth. Opium was the tool of the capitalist classes in transforming the peasantry and in monetizing their subsistence lifestyles. Opium created pools of capital and fed the institutions that accumulated it: the banking and financial systems, the insurance systems and the transportation and information infrastructures. Those structures and that economy have, in large part, been inherited by the successor nations of the region today. pps. 171-173 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. 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