Smoke And Ashes
Opium's Hidden Histories
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'A bracing new history of the global opium trade . . . Ghosh's tentacular history embraces opium's entanglement with furniture, architecture, gardens and its role in modern wars . . . But it's Ghosh's big-picture thinking that has made his nonfiction so influential . . . A huge achievement' The New York Times Book Review
From the nineteenth century the British reaped huge profits by exporting vast quantities of opium from India, waged wars to defend its access to markets, and created a devastating addiction crisis in China. A sweeping story of greed and power, Smoke and Ashes reveals how opium created the wealth of modern cities like Mumbai, Singapore and Shanghai, as well as many of America's most powerful families and institutions, and is a part of Ghosh's personal history.
'Ghosh triumphs in laying out the shame of the British Empire's opium trade for all to see' Financial Times
'This gave me a deeper chill than any TV series about the opioid crisis. . . The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb' Sunday Telegraph
'Superlative . . . synthesise[s] a wealth of research with remarkable intellectual clarity' The Times
'Expansive and thoughtful' Peter Frankopan, The Spectator
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
