INCLUDING:
ASTOR, CABOT, PEABODY, ARCHER, PERKINS HATHAWAY, WEBSTER, DELANO, COOLIDGE, AND FORBES
THROUGH MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY, OPIUM CIRCULATED IN VERY SMALL QUANTITIES and was used primarily as a medicine. Anatolia was probably the region in which farmers first began to cultivate poppies as an important commercial crop, and the practice is thought to have spread outwards from there. The armies of Alexander the Great are believed to have carried opium into Iran, hence the derivation of the Persian and Arabic words for opium, “afyun,” from the Greek “opion.” The Perso-Arabic terms, in turn, engendered the word “afeem,” widely used across the Indian subcontinent, and the Turkish and Chinese terms “afyon” and “yapian.”
A useful analogy in thinking of the social history of opium is that of an opportunistic pathogen, one that goes through long periods of dormancy, affecting very small numbers of people. But when social processes and historical events provide the pathogen with an opportunity, it bursts out to rapidly expand its circulation. With opium this happened in several phases, over centuries, usually in connection with empires. The Mongol Empire, for instance, along with its successor states, played an important role in propagating opium in many parts of Asia in the 14th and 15th centuries. This came about because opium was adopted as a recreational drug by imperial courts and ruling elites; it was not used as an instrument of state policy.
The pioneer in that regard was the Dutch East India Company, which made extensive use of opium in its quest for commercial and territorial expansion in Southeast Asia. Yet while the Dutch led the way in enmeshing opium with European colonialism, it was the British in India who perfected the model of the colonial narco-state, when they began to use opium to pay for their imports of Chinese tea, a commodity that produced enormous revenues for Britain in the colonies as well as the metropolis.
After Britain, the country that benefited the most from the China trade—and, therefore, the global traffic in opium—was none other than the United States. And in the United States, unlike in Britain, it is well-established that the beneficiaries included many of the preeminent families, institutions, and individuals in the land.
This is not to imply that fewer British subjects benefited from opium; quite the contrary. Since Britain was the prime mover behind the global drug traffic, its involvement with opium was obviously on a much larger scale than that of the United States. Not only was the British colonial apparatus in India overseeing the production and distribution of most of the world’s opium, but Britain was also home to the single largest, and richest, group of “private traders” involved in smuggling opium into China. It is possible that the pathways of the fortunes that British traders brought back could be tracked in the same way the circulation of the wealth derived from slavery has been charted in recent years. But the task would not be an easy one, because opium money seeped so deeply into 19th-century Britain that it essentially became invisible through its ubiquity. In any event, this exercise has not been undertaken, possibly because of its inherent difficulties, or because it would threaten cherished myths about Britain’s imperial past, or because there exists no domestic constituency to press for such an investigation, as was done for slavery.
On the other hand, even though the United States’ involvement with the 19th-century opium trade was on a far smaller scale than that of Britain, what became of the money that was brought back by American private traders has been tracked in considerable detail. The principal reason for this is probably that those funds had a much greater impact in the young, newly independent country, because its economy was tiny
