日志
History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600-1950
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This is the first scholarly study in which the production, trade and political effects of opium and its derivatives are shown over many centuries,
and in many countries (China, India, Indonesia, Japan, all Southeast Asian countries and some in Europe and the Americas). Starting in the 16th century,
slavery and opium became the two means with which the bodies and souls of men and women in the tropics were exploited in western imperialism and colonialism.
The first waned with the abolition movement in the 19th century, but opium production and trade continued to spread, with the associated serious social and political effects.
Around 1670 the Dutch introduced opium as a cash crop for mass production and distribution in India and Indonesia. China became the main target in the 19th century,
and only succeeded in getting rid of the opium problem around 1950. Then it had already been transformed from an "Eastern" into a "Western" problem.
History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600-1950
From its rise in the 1830s to its pinnacle in the 1930s, the opium trade was a guiding force in the Chinese political economy. Opium money was inextricably bound up in local, national, and imperial finances, and the people who piloted the trade were integral to the fabric of Chinese society. In this book, Peter Thilly narrates the dangerous lives and shrewd business operations of opium traffickers in southeast China, situating them within a global history of capitalism. By tracing the evolution of the opium trade from clandestine offshore agreements in the 1830s, to multi-million dollar prohibition bureau contracts in the 1930s, Thilly demonstrates how the modernizing Chinese state was infiltrated, manipulated, and profoundly transformed by opium profiteers. Opium merchants carried the drug by sea, over mountains, and up rivers, with leading traders establishing monopolies over trade routes and territories and assembling "opium armies" to protect their businesses. Over time, and as their ranks grew, these organizations became more bureaucratized and militarized, mimicking—and then eventually influencing, infiltrating, or supplanting—the state. Through the chaos of revolution, warlordism, and foreign invasion, opium traders diligently expanded their power through corruption, bribery, and direct collaboration with the state. Drug traders mattered—not only in the seedy ways in which they have been caricatured but also crucially as shadowy architects of statecraft and China's evolution on the world stage.
