Smoke and Ashes

September 1, 2023

While researching his award-winning "Ibis" trilogy, Ghosh came to understand the degree to which opium dictated trade in the 19th century. Engineered by the British to resolve a trade imbalance between India and China and further support imperialism, the opium trade was at the root of many of the world's leading corporations, and it benefited key U.S. families like the Astors. What results here is history, travelogue, and memoir. Prepub Alert.

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December 15, 2023
An insightful study of the opium trade as a shadowy background to the rise and fall of nations. Indian novelist Ghosh became interested in the opium trade while doing research for his acclaimed Ibis trilogy, and this book could be considered both background addendum to those novels and a stand-alone book. "It is a measure of opium's peculiar ability to insert itself into human affairs that it has created many echoes and rhymes between past and present," writes the author, who has also written a number of nonfiction books, including The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The idea of opium as a malignant force permeates the narrative, as the author traces its role in the development of global trade as well as the growth of countries and corporations. There isn't much that opium has not touched in some way in the past two centuries. Ghosh examines how opium, under British colonial direction, became a major part of the Indian economy during the 19th century and the nation's primary export to China. The social impact in both countries was devastating and, according to Ghosh, fed into a breakdown of trust in governing institutions in China. Opium spread around the world with Indian immigration, and in many regions, it was legal until recent times. The cultivation of poppies is so lucrative that it has proved impossible to eradicate, and Ghosh calculates that more opium is now produced than ever. Much of the growth is tied to the rise of opioid addiction in the U.S., which the author sees as a key reason for the fraying of the country's social fabric. Some readers may feel that the author sometimes overstates his case, yet his central thesis of opium's destructive nature is impossible to deny. A well-informed, readable, disturbing journey down a dark avenue of history.

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Starred review from January 29, 2024
Bestseller Ghosh (The Great Derangement) offers up a scintillating and kaleidoscopic vision of opium’s role in the past several centuries of global history. Centered mainly on events leading to the Opium Wars—19th-century British military incursions to force China to legalize the already booming illicit import of opium grown by decree in British India—the book’s many startling revelations include the deep enmeshment of America’s 19th-century elite (names like Astor, Cabot, Forbes) in the opium trade, which Ghosh shows was covered up not only at the time, but by their heirs. Contending that this guilt-ridden secretiveness on the part of Western opium-peddlers has had a profound impact on historiography, Ghosh exhaustively demonstrates that the widespread influence of Chinese exports on global culture has been erased from historical memory alongside the drug-dealing that fueled it. (One fascinating chapter describes how many still-treasured 19th-century antiques in the West, like supposed “Shaker” furniture, were mass produced in Guangzhou workshops; another shows that the “English garden” is entirely a Chinese invention.) Drawing on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s thinking regarding plant agency, Ghosh deepens his analysis further to contend that opium is itself an agent of history, distinguished by its cyclical activity (parallels between the 19th-century Chinese addiction epidemic and the recent U.S. opioid crisis serve as an example). Exquisitely written and packed with astonishing insight, this is a must-read.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
Ghosh began researching the long-obscured history of the opium trade while working on his historical novel, Sea of Poppies (2008), the first in the Ibis trilogy, and now shares his dramatic findings. He begins by recounting how England's avidity for tea from China led to a trade imbalance redressed by another powerful plant, the far more dangerous opium poppy. The British and Dutch empires turned this invaluable painkiller into a highly addictive narcotic and a monopolized commodity, causing immense suffering, especially in China and India. Drawing on intriguing sources, Ghosh focuses most on how the British turned India into a colonial narco-state with brutally managed poppy plantations and factories in the West and a cartel-run operation in the East that impacted his ancestors. As he tracks the immensely lucrative and catastrophic 150-year British "opium regime" in extraordinarily vivid detail, Ghosh parallels the lies told then to conceal opium's horrific consequences with the climate change-denying propaganda of today's fossil-fuel companies. He also traces the covert global flow of opium profits, including in the U.S., where early Northeastern elites used their drug fortunes to immortalize themselves by funding universities, museums, and libraries, a laundering of ill-gotten wealth repeated by the Sackler family, purveyors of the current opioid plague. Ghosh's literary prowess supercharges this eye-opening excavation of the full extent of the opium-industrial complex.

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