Reference no: EM131834308

1. What are the author's main points? Paraphrase the points that the author uses to build the argument. (There may be several. Keep in mind that information and facts are not points on their own but are used to support the author's point.)

2. What is the author's central argument? The individual main points that you identified above should have some central goal, or something that the author wishes to prove. (Remember that an author's argument is not any one point or fact, but rather the ultimate conclusion the author draws from these points.) What is the one main assertion the author most wishes to convey to the reader?

3. Think about the effectiveness of the argument. For instance: does the author's argument leave you with any further questions? Do you find the author's argument convincing? Problematic? Incomplete? What further questions might you ask of the author? What counterarguments might someone make against the author's argument? How else might someone interpret the same evidence? Is there anything that inhibits your understanding of the argument or makes it difficult to follow?

The history of opium testifies to the possibility that the logic of social change can run counter to purely formal expectations. One would think that of the two main approaches to drug control developed over the last three centuries-prohibition and criminalization on the one hand, and legalization and licensing on the other-the latter would be a more subtle and flexible form of regulation that ought to rely less on legal and physical coercion. It is perhaps a historical irony that in nineteenth-century Asia legalization was instead associated with the military impositions of the world's hegemonic state and was cemented by force into the bifurcated framework of formal colonialism and the ''imperialism of free trade.'' Born with Britain's Asian empire and lasting to within two decades of Indian independence, the long nineteenth-century opium trade can be seen as a multinational, collaborative institution that bound Indian peasants, British and Indian governments, a vast mass of Chinese consumers, and an array of Western, Parsee, Sephardic, and most of all Chinese merchants together in an immense revenue-generating system. It was also a system that gave rise to a genuinely cross-cultural opposition, for from the outset it elicited a broad front of international resistance that included otherwise ideologically disparate groups around the shared view that legalization in the service of colonial power was politically, economically, physically, and especially morally unacceptable. By the beginning of the twentieth century this alliance linking rising nationalist movements in China and India with religious anti-imperialist and temperance forces in Britain and the United States put increasing pressures on British and British Indian governments. Whether these forces would by themselves have been sufficient to undermine such a long-standing pillar of the colonial order is difficult to say. In the event, however, they were reinforced by several other factors, namely, the growing need for British governments to respond to domestic and international criticism; the official American promotion of prohibition both domestically and internationally; the emergence of the United States as a global financial and diplomatic power after World War I; the proliferation of opium production within China; and, finally, the growth of demand for new industrial drugs. All of these factors played a role in turning the historical page on the trade in processed Indian opium.

At the outset of this chapter I suggested that the opium industry of the ''long nineteenth century'' might be considered a cultural hybrid of the sort that Bruno Latour sees as typical of ''modernity.'' In his view, ''modernity'' is a phenomenon constituted by two linked but contrary processes, namely, the proliferation of culturally constructed hybrids and the simultaneous quest to identify isolatable ''essences,'' with the latter quest tending to obscure the process of hybridization. Leaving aside the question of how much light this model sheds on ''the modern constitution'' as such, one can argue that Latour's analysis does at least evoke the structure of imperial power during the late colonial era. Within the ''formal'' colonial order, his paired processes of hybridization and essentialization can be seen as institutionalized in the structural bifurcation between the institutions of Western law governing citizens under direct colonial rule and the officially sanctioned institutions of ''customary law'' applicable to subjects organized under various forms of indirect rule.91 In this system, which the British elaborated in India and then applied, with desired modifications, to Africa, the symbiosis of the two sets of institutions was typically obscured by the process of conceiving each subsystem as the expression of distinct cultural or racial essences. Beyond the ''formal'' empires of the European powers, China, Persia, and the Ottoman empire were also subjected to Western economic and political hegemony as spheres of Europe's nineteenthcentury ''informal empire,'' and within this framework they too were transformed through interactions with Western imperial power. Many of the new institutions-economic, political, social, and cultural-that emerged from such interactions can be considered hybrids in the sense that they sprang from such common (if unequal) relationships, and while fusing features of previously distinct societies, they constituted phenomena of new and unique character.

At the economic level, the history of the opium trade between British India and China illustrates the degree to which markets are socially constructed. While the opium industry served as an all too obviously constructed institutional nexus binding China, Britain, and India together for a century and a half, there always existed throughout the period-in accord with the Latour model-persistent attempts to deny the collaborative nature of the opium network by portraying it as essentially the result either of Chinese depravity and corruption or of the overweening greed of British governments and merchants-in either case, as deriving from some trait characteristic of one participant only, which the other was only accommodating or submitting to. The Chinese case in this regard was perhaps stronger before 1870, the British after 1913; but over the long nineteenth century each side contributed to, and was shaped by, the cohesive trade structure that linked them. Explaining that cohesive system adequately calls for the study of each country's changing involvement with opium across time, the specification of evolving international power relations, and the analysis of the long interplay between the push of British Indian supply and the pull of Chinese demand for the drug.

One further feature of the international opium trade that has been obscured by the focus on national interests and antagonisms is the prominent degree of collaboration involved in the opium system. However, collaboration did not only involve those tied into the chain of production and distribution of the drug, and those who profited from it in various ways; it was also a strategy cultivated by those opposed to the trade. In other words, collaboration was important not only for initiating and maintaining the trade, but also for bringing about its demise, as Kathleen Lodwick points out when she observes that ''opium suppression became a reality only when public opinion in Britain and China favored it.'' By contributing to the mobilization of broad political movements that converged in their opposition to the trade, the coordination of anti-opium agitation across cultures played a key political role in bringing about the demise of the trade in Indian opium to China, though mercantile and diplomatic conditions no doubt shaped the timing of the 1913 British stoppage. The fact that from the 1830s on Western anti-opium agitators regularly confronted their audiences with Chinese objections to the drug and exposed British interests behind the trade shows that, as in the anti-slavery and women's rights movements,94 and despite clear ideological differences, cross-cultural communication could be effective among those fighting against the opium trade in their respective societies.