The therapeutic uses of economic history: opium and 20th century China
Home > The therapeutic uses of economic history: opium and 20th century China
In this blog post, Lucas Tse of the University of Oxford introduces his research on the international regulation of the opium trade in China in the 20th century.
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Boiled, dried, rolled into balls then packed, often in small, flat tins, the unassuming bulb of the poppy plant was used to alleviate pain and induce euphoria. Opium had many lives as a commodity before it became a major theme in modern Chinese history. It attracted morally charged judgments from far-flung corners of society. Anti-opium activists in the 1920s, for example, described the drug trade as 滅種, ‘genocidal’. Opium also stumped observers. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote: ‘human nature itself sinks down to such a depth of despicable meanness, that it is hateful even to follow the story to its conclusion.’
And yet pursuing the story to its conclusion is necessary to clarify the reality and lessons of history. Both invective and silence have limited effect in challenging the standard potted history, often laced with a nationalist flavour—that progress meant asserting sovereign control over the trade of goods and expelling the foreign evil from the land. In this post, I suggest some ways in which economic history can play a therapeutic role for analyses of the drug trade. Returning to opium history as commodity history is at once sobering and generative—it deflates narratives about a ‘century of humiliation’, and it raises new questions about an important aspect of social life.
From patterns of production and consumption to new research agendas
Britain abandoned its advocacy of the drug trade in 1907. Around the same time, China became a major producer of opium. The import-oriented story of opium misses a crucial transformation in the early 20th century—its indigenisation. Throughout the 1920s, Chinese representatives were in an awkward position at international meetings: they repeated the victimisation narrative while they faced inconvenient questions about the smuggling of Chinese-produced opium to Southeast Asia. This leads into another topic for further research that the standard story misses: the ‘Asianisation’ of the opium trade. As imports from India fell, opium destined for China increasingly came from Asian port cities, Busan in Korea and Bushehr in Persia. Europeans were responsible for opium’s emergence as the first mass-produced commodity in Asia. But to understand mass circulation, we need to look at regional business networks. Similarly, mass consumption was the threshold by which opium turned from a luxury aphrodisiac into China’s ‘problem’. In other words, it became affordable for the labouring poor. A class-based analysis of opium asks how its market growth drew disparate actors into shared social ecosystems.
To understand drug governance, follow the money
By the turn of the 20th century, opium revenues were no less important for the Chinese government than they were for colonial regimes. The Northern Expedition of 1926-1928, which united large parts of China, was partially financed by opium through a tax farming model. The flow of opium revenue provides a basic scheme for dynamics between central government and provincial power-holders, including ‘warlords’. Opium is also a key for understanding alternative governance structures. Consider a merchant called Ye Qinghe, later known as the ‘Opium King’. Ye was associated with the Green Gang, which ran parts of Shanghai with quasi-governmental authority. Power followed money. The source of this power was not just organised crime at the local level, but a wide commercial network that included contacts in Istanbul and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffman-La Roche. But this network would lose its power if it publicly announced itself. Officialdom and illicit economies sometimes ignored, sometimes competed and sometimes collaborated with each other. The important details of the drug trade often rested in acts of evasion and disguise rather than top-down edicts.
Reconstructing policy frameworks
Transnational drug policy reflected shifting attitudes towards the tension between liberal norms of international trade and restrictions on ‘dangerous’ drugs. At a League of Nations meeting in 1929, the Italian diplomat Stefano Cavazzoni reminded his colleagues that drugs ‘did not fall like manna from the heavens’ but were put into the world. He was arguing against the 1920s orthodoxy that the regulation of drugs could legitimately extend only to circulation, not production. This belief was enshrined in a conference in 1925 that established a statistical control system for the narcotics trade. The Chinese and American governments walked out of this conference because they demanded a supply-side solution. A conference in Geneva in 1931 delivered a new consensus on limiting the manufacture of narcotics through fixed rations. This resulted from political cunning as well as ongoing debates about the relationship between international economic institutions and national sovereignty. The language of ‘demilitarising’ drugs anticipated the development of broader security frameworks.
The complexity of the opium trade attracted the attention of pioneering social scientists. Ma Yinchu, one of China’s first modern economists, argued that economic analysis of the drug trade was essential precisely because it was ‘a matter of life and death’ for his country. He looked to economic history to provide multicausal explanations for the role of drugs in a globalised economy. Our need to grapple with this question has not diminished over the past century. Comparative and integrated commodity histories remain essential.
To contact the author:
Lucas Tse
University of Oxford
