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Opium's Reverse Course: A Story of Shifting Winds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Peter Thilly
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Abstract

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Drawing from the author's The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022), this essay explores China's history as an opium-exporting nation in the early twentieth century. For several decades, southeast coastal China served markets from San Francisco to Manila to Rangoon with illicit opium, morphine, heroin, and cocaine. The essay explains the multiple causes of these developments and argues that this history has been so poorly understood because of its uneasy place within broadly accepted metanarratives about opium, empire, and national victimization.

Keywords

OpiumChinaSoutheast AsiaCapitalismEmpire
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 18 , October 2022 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2022

References

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