251. Victorian Narcos: Flooding China With Indian Opium (Ep 5)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. We left you with one of my favourite episodes, which is When Diplomacy Goes Bad. And it really went very, very badly with the McCartney mission that should have been fab, like, you know, not even a quarter of the fab four, a full four quarters of fabulousness, with Lord McCartney going over to the Chinese and wooing them for their trade, their friendship, diamond-studded mulberry suit.

1:08which we found preposterous from beginning to end. His diving bell, his hot air balloon. I mean, he'd done so much homework. He did try. He did try, but everything that could have gone wrong went wrong for him. But instead, at the end of that episode, we left you with a situation where that balance of payments, which was so in favour of China, because all English silver was going towards China for the tea, the insatiable appetite for tea. But it starts to balance out, not because they've got a trade deal, but because very quietly and on the slide, on the quiet, the opium trade, which is being mastered by British people, some private individuals who want to make their name have found out how to get opium into China.

1:54And William gave us some figures towards the end of that, of just how quickly that opium trade was growing. And this episode, William, is about two particular individuals who are going to be inextricably linked with the now astronomical rise of that opium trade in China. One, Mr. Jardine and one, Mr. Matheson. And if Jardine Matheson rings a bell, that's because that entity that was sort of grown out of those, well poppy seeds if you like exists today as a major player still in in in hong kong and in china and it is an extraordinary story the way that the british ultimately end up going to war in order to facilitate the narcotics trade uh everything that the opposite of the of the current war on drugs, the British are fighting for private drug dealers.

2:51It's an astonishing moment in imperial history and illustrates as well as anything the kind of absurdly venal nature of imperialism, of the way that the entire enterprise of the East India Company operated. Now, one of the things that the McCartney mission was trying to do was to give the British traders greater access to China, because they were hemmed in on a single riverbank outside Canton, and were not even allowed to visit Canton itself. It was an incredibly restricted life where the different foreign communities were hedged in in little compounds, each one facing the river, each one with its own flag.

3:37and that had been the case since the 1720s and it continued despite the efforts of the McCartney mission to change that. I can't stress this enough how strictly this was enforced. So we mentioned that wonderful Stephen Platt book in the last episode. Imperial Twilight, wonderful, wonderful book. But we're talking about people who had not even been a mile and a half up the road from their particular area of containment and contonement. They wouldn't be allowed and they also would not dare. So they hadn't even seen the roads connecting their containment to the next habitable place. It was that hermetically sealed, their existence.

4:20And yet from that walled compound, these guys were making fortunes. They were becoming the richest traders in the world in the single largest trade that was going on between the two largest empires in the world, the British Empire and the great Manchu Empire of China. To give you a slightly more visual take on the compounds that they're walled into, there's several of them in a line, and the large ones have the flags of the country they represent on the riverfront. Britain, France, the United States. and inside these compounds they have everything they need to live and they're looked after by a vast Chinese staff there are stewards servants cooks valets butlers menial servants to pull the punkers and to deliver them food some pens with livestock pigs cows sheep and inside some of these buildings.

5:24You have chandeliers and portraits and chapels and all the paraphernalia of a sort of colonial outpost. But what's important to remember is that none of these are actually owned by the British, the French or the United States. They're just leased. Because none of these guys are in charge here. Yeah, it's the Chinese who are running the show. And the buildings, every single one of them are owned by Chinese merchants who rent them out to the foreign traders. And the servants are employed not ultimately by the foreigners who are being served, but by their Chinese superiors. And so it's a very different situation from a colonial situation.

6:07These guys are very well-tended prisoners, in a sense. Prisoners who are allowed to make fortunes, prisoners who are given every luxury, but they're not in control of their own lives. They're hemmed into these little compounds as long as they want to stay and as long as they continue to make money. Just a little more insight on this kind of prison compound, as you put it. I mean, there are worse places to be. There's living apartments, which are really, really spacious and, as you said, beautifully decorated. A dining room for more than 100 guests. A billiard room. A library. And the library on its own has 4 ,000 books.

6:42Not going short of reading matter. Well, I mean, they can't go up the road. So what else is there to do apart from play billiards, read books and make money. And that's what they are. I mean, factories in only one sense, and they're factories, as William said in a previous episode, because those people representing the nation are called factories. So they are factories. They are not industrial sites in any way. But if they are churning something out, it is money. It is the ability to make money. And there is a voracious appetite to make more money. They can see what the potential is, even though they can't reach their left arm and their right arm further than the walls of their own compound, a compound that doesn't even belong to them.

7:23So, I mean, whose idea, first of all, is this to keep them contained? This is very much a Chinese ideal that you're not going to come and corrupt our people. Yeah, you're not corrupting our people, you're not corrupting our way of life. And what's important to remember is that these compounds are only there for the licit trade, for the legal trade. So, this is all about buying tea from the Chinese. But that, as we know, is only half the picture. And alongside this, there is a completely different illegal trade going on, often by the same people, but at one remove, using Chinese gangsters, bringing in opium and uploading it off little offshore islands, uninhabited places, where they can transfer them to the boats called crabs of Chinese gangsters, who then distribute it around the Chinese interior.

8:14And beyond that, beyond this sort of double system, the licit and the illicit, the legal and the illegal, you have a growing and increasingly repressive machinery in India of the East India Company state, which won't touch the opium in China because it's illegal, but grows it, plans it, sets the price, sets the quality, owns the factories and determines the lives of the planters in Bihar and in Bengal, who are producing this most profitable of crops. So, I mean, if you were to look at it as an industry, you have the entire supply chain from seed to export, which is controlled by the British, the East India Company largely.

9:03but distribution then needs to be a bilateral affair and it's not legal it is not allowed it is not meant to be something that is claimed by a country but even though it's been cornered by one particular country so this kind of thuggery and a sort of a almost parallel militarization that is going on it's going to prove crucial in what we've referred to before a growing appetite for opium in China and the violent, illicit ways it is distributed around the country and also the way in which that monopoly is protected and controlled. What I think we should look at now is the increasing power and the increasingly repressive authority of the East India Company's opium department.

9:49Now, this, as we said, is not involved in selling opium to the Chinese. It's only involved in the manufacture and the creation of opium. But as opium becomes a more and more important crop, the East India Company gives over more and more of Bihar, the entire area as far as Benares, which is now in Uttar Pradesh, to this crop. And by the second half of the 19th century, roughly half a million acres have come to be sown with poppy. And it's very labor-intensive agriculture. They probably control the lives of between five and seven million people. Those numbers are eye-watering. You need to understand how if you are in control of that many people, you have their fates entirely in your hands.

10:40So just as later on with India and when it's the Raj that's in charge and they tell farmers and growers that they must grow indigo instead of food crops, the same thing is happening here with Opium and the East India Company. If you're in control of five to seven million people, what you're telling them is this is what you will do. We're in charge of you. You will grow this stuff. And sometimes, you know, the side effect of that is that you have farmers who aren't able to feed their families. Well, the system is that the man in charge of each district is the opium agent, which is a deceptively humble title for a man that's actually very highly paid and very, very powerful and controls a great area of India.

11:24And he has below him British East India Company officials, then local strongmen below that at the next level. One of these, for example, is Henry Osborne, who keeps a diary that Amitav Ghosh writes about in his wonderful book, Smoke and Ashes. And he writes that Henry Osborne sleeps with a pistol under his mattress, suffering frequent bouts of depression, some brought about by his wife singing. So you can see this unhappy couple stuck in the middle of Bihar. Everyone's a critic. That's really harsh. But this is interesting. Listen. So Osborne has got a colleague called Richard W. Blair, who has brought his family out to live in the small town of Bihar, where he's posted as sub-deputy opium agent.

12:11So he's a very junior figure in this hierarchy. And it's there in a place called Motihari, near the Nepal border, that Eric Blair, who later took the name George Orwell, is born in 1903 at the very end of this story. I mean, George Orwell, people, that's what he said. I just want to repeat it in case, you know, they didn't hear it. The George Orwell, born in India, son of a sub-deputy opium agent. It's extraordinary. And he, of course, is quickly, like all children of the Raj, sent abroad for education, that whole world that Kipling writes about in Barbar Blacksheet. So he's sent away so he doesn't grow up amid these poppy fields.

12:52But he does, when he comes back as a junior imperial policeman, he does smoke it. In Burma, because he's stationed in Burma, isn't he? I mean, that's where he's a police officer. Certainly he implies that because he says in one of his writings in his Burma book, Burmese Days, what are the pleasures of opium? Like other pleasures, they are fortunately indescribable. So it's very interesting. Although we're talking about the 1830s in this episode, this continues on right through to Orwell, who is the great mystic, if you like, of authoritarianism in the mid 20th century, the author of 1984, the author of Animal Farm and a host of other extraordinary classics.

13:34And just as with Animal Farm, you know, you have pigs running things and everybody else running themselves ragged to try and supply the pigs. I mean, all I would have been aware of how difficult the lives of the opium farmers were who were trying to fulfill these orders that are coming from, you know, apart from anyone else, his dad and others who work above his dad. Because it is a wretched life for an opium grower. First of all, the prices are fixed. You have no say in what your crop is worth. You're just told this is what you're growing. It is set by Brits who come and they tell you what you have to do.

14:09And it is a very low rate. I mean, you've got some numbers, William, which will just tell you how much into poverty it plunged people to grow. I'm very much relying here on Amitav Ghosh's book, Smoke and Ashes. And Amitav is a friend. He has written three extraordinary novels set amid the opium fields of Bihar and the Canton opium wars and the lives of indentured laborers. It's a brilliant trilogy. And Smoke and Ashes, he talks about the sources of his fiction. He talks about the big Ghazipur opium factory, which is the industrial center of the opium trade. It's set up at the time of Lord Cornwallis, who famously was the man who surrendered to Washington, who in the 1780s at Yorktown hands over the keys of America to Washington, and then gets recruited by the East India Company, where among the many reforms that he makes in India, he sets up this quasi-military fortress-like opium factory, surrounded by high red brick walls.

15:13And he turns Ghazipur, which had previously been a Mughal center in the middle of what's now Uttar Pradesh, into a company town dedicated entirely to the creation of opium. It was a pretty miserable life for the humans who work in it. They're barefoot. The processing is done entirely by hand. These barefoot workers spend as much as 10 hours a day, according to Amitav, tramping up and down the long vats of opium. The fumes are so heavy, he writes, that they often become sleepy and lethargic. Many visitors remark on the powerful smell that pervades the factory. The air is redolent with opium, not with narcotic and purified odor of the finished drug, but the odor of indescribable nastiness.

16:00One of the people who visits it is Kipling, as we just talked about him. And the only people that seem to be happy in this miserable industrial narcotic center are the troops of monkeys who apparently love to lap up the efforts that flow out of the factory's drains. Are they high monkeys? According to Amitabh, they're the most contented and tranquil monkeys in all of Hindustan. So, I mean, apart from having, you know, sort of junky monkeys, junky monkeys, isn't that great? Very good. The numbers that I was trying to wheedle out of you, I'll give them now because I found them now. So, I mean, the rate at which the price of opium was fixed is so ridiculously low and it stays at this rate.

16:42It's three rupees and 50 pasa for a sear, which is a little more than a kilogram of raw opium. And that stays the same price for decades. So it doesn't matter what the markets are doing. It doesn't matter what the demand is. It is three and a half rupees for more than a kilogram of raw opium. As William described it there is a sort of a refinement process that goes on. A lot of flowers go into manufacturing this clump of black delirium in the impian terms. And so, you know, you can see why, apart from living in what seems like a hellscape from what Amitav writes, you're also always on the verge of starvation because you don't have money.

17:25And you also, you have land, but you don't have the wherewithal or the power to grow the things that you need. Food, for example. and amitav quotes the farmers he's found petitions by the farmers saying can we just grow ordinary food you know we just want to grow grain we want to grow rice like everybody else and their petition ends we cultivate the poppy under pressure from government otherwise we would not do and our prayer is that we may be released from this trouble so these guys have no option but to grow this stuff which makes everyone money except them the actual opium farmers because the prices fixed because they're not given the market price.

18:03They are poorer and poorer. But this is the most successful trade in early 19th century India. I think it's important to, in a sense, zoom out for a second. India hugely enriched 18th century Britain, particularly because of the textile trade, which was the most advanced in the world. The gorgeous cotton, the amazing silks or the kalamkaris and painted textiles that India produced were hot property in the 18th century. And the British East India Company makes its money by shipping all those textiles abroad. But by the early 19th century, India has ceased to make money because it's now become the Raj.

18:45It's all solidified into a very expensive place to administer. And the sums are not adding up. And the only thing which makes the economics work, particularly after the company has lost a lot of money adding Afghanistan or attempting to add Afghanistan to its properties, which again, more than anything else, requires massive troops in forts all over the country to try and keep the Afghans in order. And it's an enormously expensive place to police and brings in very little money. So the East India Company would be completely in the red, but for the amazing success that they've had with opium sales.

19:27And I gave the figures before, but it's worth having them again. You move from about 200 chests of opium in 1767, and that increases within a decade to about 1 ,000. By 1 ,800, 20 years later, it's up to 5 ,000 chests. It actually grows to be the keystone of the colonial economy. I rather like this, which again is from Amitav's book. He has found a US National Defense University document which says, English merchants led by the East India Company from 1772 to 1850 established an extensive opium supply train creating the world's first drug cartel. Oh, he has such a turn of phrase. He has another turn a phrase which I'm going to read out as well from Amthel's book which he says you know that the colonial economy that you've just described which is underpinned and now carried after you know the Raj has taken over and it's now very expensive to run a country and take control as it has and he says like the yeast in bread dough this is the substance upon which the entire structure depended I mean he's he's a neat writer he's a very very memorable thing there but I mean what What is the legal situation now?

20:42I mean, they've industrialized the production, they have fixed the prices, but you still need to export. And I said that was something that wasn't yet in their hands. But how are the exports growing at the rate at which you suggest they're growing? So that's where we come to these two figures, Jardine and Matheson. So the company, because it's a legal structure, feels that it can grow the opium, it can fill the chest, It can build the factory, organize the farmers into the largest drug cartel in the world. But it feels it can't actually be responsible for selling it illegally in China. So what happens is that the opium gets sent under guard.

21:25I mean, this is very, very valuable material. Some people call it black gold, don't they, sometimes, because it is that valuable. So it gets sent in heavily guarded fleets down the Ganges to Calcutta. it's then put onto the quayside and pretty close to the quayside it's auctioned off to private traders and that's where figures like jardine and matheson come in they buy the opium they take the risk and it's up to them to distribute it so the british of course know exactly what's going on this isn't covert at all but they can deny it in the court of law that oh well i didn't know what's going to happen to it yeah can i just say that these are auctions that are in the open air in front of the busy bustling sort of you know quayside it's not it's not done secretly there's not there's not even done in in barns at the dead of night you have these big chests that are on the quayside if you've ever seen in films you know there's sort of the auctioning of livestock you know they just keep that is how these auctions take place that is how people are outbidding each other not whispering as you would with an illegal trade but yelling at the tops of their voices to try and outbid their competitors so everybody knows everyone knows this is you would have to be blind and deaf not to know this is going on.

22:32So it is just to give you plausible deniability that you keep it slightly outside the edge of what you're doing. Now, the British are not the only people who can grow opium, of course. And as we saw in one of the very first episodes of this series, there has always been traditional opium trade in India. It isn't something that's been introduced by the British, nor even was the idea of selling opium to China, a British innovation. This is something that the Mughals and Bengali shippers have been doing for generations. It continues outside company India. Remember, at this point in the 1830s, there's a great swathes of India that are not under company control.

23:11There's the whole Maratha areas in central India, and those areas are also big opium producing centers. So you have, as well is the official East India company opium trade, which is happening under the opium agency in Bihar, then sending the opium in fleets down the Ganges to Calcutta, where it's being spirited off by private traders away from the eyes of the company and off their books. As well as that, you have a rival consortium growing, whereby in the Maratha territories in what's now Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka and Maharashtra, you have Indian growers buying opium from peasants who are not under the authority of the Opium Agency, but nonetheless are being effectively under almost as much pressure because this is the Mawari moneylenders, they're giving loans to poor farmers, often the farmers like today can't repay it, there's also a measure of coercion.

24:09And this opium, which is slightly different it's it has a higher morphine quality so smokers like it very much and yet it's less reliable because as it doesn't come out of a single company factory it's more open to adulteration so chalk and talc and all sorts of other things get shoved into it like with modern cocaine on the street of america or britain or heroin uh it's often adulterated but nonetheless so there's two completely different streams and this ends up in carachi which in the 1830s is not yet under company control. It will become so by the 1840s. It comes out of Goa, but in particular, it comes out of Bombay.

24:49And Bombay is an opium town. And particularly, the greatest traders of Bombay, who are the Parsis, that's the Zoroastrians, who'd fled Iran, set themselves up in Gujarat, and then Bombay, and have great, great commercial skills. These guys organized, if you'd like, a rival cartel, which is initially in competition with the company. But what's fascinating, what we'll see is that quite a lot of the British realize that the Parsis are as good or better than they are at this. Well, they're better connected. Language skills, better connected. Absolutely, yeah. And so what you find is that in many of these cases, the same sort of private traders who are buying company opium on the keys of Calcutta are in business with the Parsis who are doing the Indian opium out of Madhya Pradesh and the central India and exporting it out of Bombay.

25:42You've got basically two flavours to choose from and the Parsis are involved in both which is one of the reasons they become and some families become fabulously wealthy in Bombay, the Bombay Parsons in particular. We're going to talk about some of them in more detail after the break. But just before we take the break, you were telling me in one of our little gossipy chats, and I hope it's all right to share it with the listeners, about a friend of yours that you've just been chatting to, who you said was quite happy to be described as a former user of heroin and opium, who has experienced that kind of Bombay opium den that has remained unchanged for a very long time.

26:23So literally this weekend, I was on stage with my friend Jeet Thail, who is one of India's leading poets and a booker shortlisted novelist. Now, Jeet wrote a book a few years ago called Narcopolis, which is about the opium dens in Bombay. And in his youth, he's now in his mid 60s. But in his youth, he remembers going to the last opium dens of Bombay, where people lay down, used these he called very beautiful antique pipes which were made especially for this in Bombay and he said there was a great art to people taking these little balls of opium giving it just the right contact with the flame and then getting it going and handing it to the hipsters that's where that word comes from because you're lying on your hip on your hip I love that you said that a couple of episodes ago and I still haven't got over it yeah and Jeet was one of these hipsters and they were abolished in 1984.

27:20And Jeet said that it was a catastrophe because the opium that was smoked in Bombay was many times less addictive than heroin. And when Bombay opium dems were closed in 1984, almost all the users who got some sort of habit that they were living with, often for 20 or 30 years, went over to heroin. And the Bombay heroin was the worst quality heroin coming out of Afghanistan. It was a devastating plague. I mean, the number of people who died. Exactly. And he said that many of his friends died after the dens closed. But he has sort of, I mean, maybe it's just a romantic memory of a man who remembers what he was doing as a teenager.

27:59And he's now in his mid-60s. But he remembers, I think of Opium Dens as something that happened in Fu Manchu novels in 1890s or something. People dying all over the place. Yeah, no, absolutely. But this is 1984. So we have had a half with both George Orwell and 1984 in it. Just saying weird, isn't it? Join us after the break.

28:40fine on.

28:45Welcome back. So just a 1984, William, was a book by George Orwell. He's just looking at me like, what? What are you on a book? I didn't make the link between 1984 when the opium dens got closed down. Literally just told us. Anyway. And so often, Anita, I miss so many of your gems. It's weeks later sometimes that I get the punchlines. Can I just say that nothing is as healthy for comedy as explaining it in painful, horrible detail. Say thanks. Thanks to that. Right. OK. So we were talking about some of the names that are going to become enormously important. Let's park the Parsi names for a second because we've given you the Parsi landscape and the Bombay landscape.

29:30But I want to home in again and in more detail on these names, Jardine and Matheson, who are, as you say, enormous players in the world market today in all sorts of different things, stocks and shares and other things, real estate, pharmaceuticals and many other things. But in their day, who were William Jardine and James Matheson? And we're talking about now the 1830s. 1830s is what we're going to be homing in because this is the lead up to the first opium war. How on earth did Britain end up going to war for the right to sell narcotics? This is one of the great sort of extraordinary stories of imperial history.