The Opium Trade Prior to 1832
British commercial efforts to push opium. British trade in China during the 1700s consisted of buying an enormous amount of tea, but paying for that tea in cash. They had very little to sell that the Chinese wanted. The British East India Company (BEIC) thus began their colonization of India with the long-term plan of growing cotton and eventually gaining a more advantageous balance of trade in China. The plan did not work out, however, as the Chinese market did not respond to British manufactured textiles as the BEIC planners had hoped. Opium, on the other hand, sold quite well. So the plan changed. Any explanation of the opium trade in China thus has to look to Patna and Benares, territories conquered by the BEIC and transformed into opium-producing dynamos in the first several decades of the 1800s.
The rise of smoking and drug culture. The other way to explain the rise of opium is to look to the consumers: why did they start smoking and how did it spread? As historian Carl Trocki and others have shown, opium smoking was pioneered sometime in the seventeenth century on the island of Java, where Chinese migrants seem to have begun mixing the drug with tobacco brought to Asia by the Dutch.* The practice spread into China through returned migrants from the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and by 1729 the Yongzheng Emperor banned importation the substance, citing it as a problem among the natives of Fujian and Guangdong.** By 1800 or so, the drug was ubiquitous across China, used widely across class, gender, and geographic lines.
*Source: Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750-1950, (Oxon: Routledge, 1999), 35-36.
**Source: Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 34.
See also Zheng Yangwen, The Social Life of Opium in China, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially chapters 4-6.
