日志
Amitav Ghosh on the Low Family and the Opium Trade
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Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research.
In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large.
The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China to redress their great trade
imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the empire’s financial survival. Tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium
at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions
(from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.
The Columbia University and Slavery Project is a research and justice initiative examining Columbia’s connections to
the history and legacies of enslavement. The ongoing work aims to provide a fuller and more nuanced picture of Columbia’s past,
while also helping to inform conversations about the university’s role in the present.
