 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. This is a very special program in which we are going to be talking about history, but of a different kind of history. History normally in India is seen essentially, especially in the last few years, as some kind of a civilizational conflict. Very recently you had the Chief Minister of Haryana advising his advisors or his supporters. The best way to get into history books is by beating up protesters. We are not going to be talking about anything of this kind of history. We are instead, we are going to be talking about history in the context of a very important book, which has just recently come out. The book has been written by Thomas Manuel and it's called the Opium Inc. Incorporated, How a Global Drug Trade Funded the British Empire. First of all, thank you Thomas Manuel for joining us on this program. I'm also joined by the editor-in-chief of NewsClick, Prabhupurakas, who is going to be also giving his perspective on the book and also the subject matter of the book. So let me begin by asking Thomas, what was the importance of opium, the trade of opium in British colonialism in India? I know that in your book you have very succinctly put it, that is your central theme that the British got tea, the Chinese got opium and Indians got colonialism. Can you explain on this a bit? Yeah, so that neat kind of formulation is actually from the historian Tan Cho, who was Indian and Chinese origin. And so the way that I see it is that when we think about the material forces behind the British Empire, we know what their major sources of income were. We know land revenue was important. That is kind of in popular culture. The salt revenue was important. Again, that's kind of like seared into our understanding of history because of Gandhi's March and things like that. But at its peak, the third highest revenue source for the British was opium. And this is something that I think a lot of people don't quite know. So how did the opium trade arise? The way that I see it based on my readings is that essentially the British had this challenge of they had conquered parts of India starting with Bengal. And that's where the opium trade also was started. Yeah, but they had this problem of how to make this Indian colony cash positive. Like how do they make it and their return on this kind of like this huge military cost outlay in conquering more territory and maintaining this country like how to like recoup those costs. And especially because they had this ongoing silver crisis. So what was happening at that time was they were importing tea from China. Now kind of like tea at this point was kind of national obsession for the British. The British government itself almost one tenth of its revenue that point of time was coming from import duties on tea. There was just this huge quantity of tea that was going from China to Britain. And the problem was the Chinese were not willing to accept really like any goods in exchange. They wanted silver. And the British were at a point where almost like their entire physical reserves of silver had almost become zero because they had just given so much of it was just flowing into China constantly. They needed something else to sell to the Chinese in exchange for tea. And at the same time, they had this Indian colony which was growing, which was not really productive in the way that they wanted it to be productive. They were looking at how do we make money off this. And they kind of looked at these two problems and they found their solution in the opium trade, which they started at a huge kind of like mass scale in what is now Bengal and Bihar. And they would, even though it was illegal in China, most of its existence, they would kind of sell it to the Chinese. It is an addictive drug and they kind of smuggled in China, pushed it on the Chinese to some extent. And once the demand for that grew, that was enough for them to continue their own tea habit. Okay, okay. Praveed, your opening thoughts on the importance of opium and its trade, for the rise and the growth and the consolidation of the British colonialism in India. Let's take a little step back. If we look at the entire empire building which came out of a handful of West European countries in this period. It is really the French, the British, the Dutch and even the Spanish and the Portuguese. Now, you will see that there is a link in all of this and the link, as Thomas says, is of course, one part of it is bullion, which comes from the loot of the Americas, Spanish particularly. And then it comes into the European countries through Amsterdam, the Dutch actually. But then how do they get a positive balance? It comes to the balance of trade issue, which is also what is there currently in different countries. But the balance of trade that they had a problem, because they were not able to produce anything that either China or India, the two largest land masses, the populations if we will, required. And they were actually buying either textiles from India and tea and other textiles also from China. How did they balance their books? The Dutch actually started the opium trade first in East Indies, Portuguese to Macau into China. The British, who by the time had got the land revenues of the Bengal, this area, which becomes the Bengal presidency. And then they were funding their military expansion through the land revenue. But they needed something else as well. Thomas says that it is accidentally that opium. So that is how Bengal becomes the first trade. No, it's interesting. Bengal becomes a trading center. But it's grown really from Bihar and UPI. That's the area if you see. Bengal, as you know, becomes the Indigo area as well as Bihar. And Indigo also is something which is known historically, was also used particularly for this kind of purposes. Also salt Peter, but the basic trade balancing with China takes place to opium. And as we know, the British as well as the Europeans fought opium wars, because they wanted to open up China. And the British were doing it for them. And therefore the opium wars are fought for the right to sell opium to the Chinese people, while they did not sell, they in fact banned the consumption of opium, trade of opium into Britain itself. So that is the duplicity of the British if you will. But then we have always known British have been duplicitous in their empire building. So it's also interesting that the history of Western Empire, the mercantile empires of this period is based on slave trade, based on opium, what throaty calls addictive substances. It's not only opium, but he also categorizes, for instance, tea, coffee, tobacco, including sugar as essentially as addictive substances. So this is what the West European empires are based on. And of course, slave trade. Yeah, you look up some. Yes, you were also talking about slave trade. We talk about it a bit later. Thomas, you know, getting back to your book, I, you know, remember here reading and you know, also listening to you saying that essentially this book emerged out of a fairly long article which you wrote for the Hindu sometime in 2019. Right after that, there was the pandemic. So obviously, there were, you know, limitations of what all you could explore. But whatever little you were able to, you know, read up and whatever you were able to research, you know, Prabir was talking about that though Bengal became the main trading center of opium. It was essentially Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which became the areas where it was produced. But there were large parts of India also, you know, in completely different geographical area, the Malwa region specifically. And then the Bombay became a major trading center. You know, from you in your book, you have spent considerable time, both on Bombay, as well as on the Malwa chapters of the opium trade, if I can, can you just elaborate a bit on it? Yeah, so the British had declared a monopoly on opium in India. They decided that they were the only ones that had the right to grow it. And this was before they had conquered all of the Indian territory. They were just declaring this monopoly on even on lands that they didn't conquer. So they discovered somewhere around the beginning of the 19th century that opium from India, but that didn't come through them was coming into China and kind of like disrupting their markets and things like that. And then they discovered that there was this kind of growing opium trade out of out of Western India, out of the Malwa plateau, which is sort of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, places like that. And basically, various kingdoms and the Maratha Confederacy at that time were seeing the high price that opium was going for was kind of like participating in this trade. And the British tried to kind of stop it at various times. I think they spent almost like 30 years negotiating treaties with everybody trying to either become the sole buyers of all the opium they produced or telling them to stop growing it, but paying them some kind of like some money to compensate for that. But eventually in about 1830, they decided that they couldn't stop this smuggling. They called it smuggling. And they basically made it legal. They said, you can export it through Bombay as long as you pay a kind of transit duty at Bombay. And this is huge for Bombay as a city because suddenly all this opium is going through there, Bombay becomes rich. Like all of these like Parsi traders primarily, but also like various other communities like other. There are Muslim, mercantile communities as well. And basically like they become immensely wealthy. And that's kind of like how I came into this, like I was researching the Parsi trader Jamsat Gigi boy for the Hindu, like you said. And the amount of money that this man accumulated in his lifetime in the 19th century is truly absurd. We're talking about like 40 crores and things like that at that point of time, like he becomes the first, like he becomes a full-time philanthropist. He earns himself the title of baronet, like the queen gives him a hereditary title. He's the first kind of like Indian to do that. And the idea that such wealth could be accumulated in India by non-British traders to me is fascinating and under discussed, right? The role of Indian merchants in colonization generally. You also mentioned about philanthropy, the JJ School of Art and the hospital, Praveen, you have also given considerable thought on the various communities which are involved in the OPM trade and also the regions. What are the basic issues or the facts that you have come across which is largely unknown? I think it's interesting because a lot of these facts have been also airbrushed out of history because the Indian bourgeoisie also was not interested in people finding out their antecedents. Just as the English bourgeoisie was not interested in finding out where Jordan Madison's money comes from, it becomes a huge business empire later, still today. How Hong Kong Shanghai Bank is formed. So all those things are also airbrushed out of history. So you also have the Indian bourgeoisie also not willing to talk about their antecedents and a lot of it, as Thomas says, came out of what would be called the Bombay Belt and that was really initially trading. Then the branch out into different things from Label Docks to Steel Plant as Tata's did, but a lot of that money came from OPM wealth that they accumulated and the relationship between the Indian Bombay based industries later and initially merchants and the Hong Kong links are very deep and they really had even offices over there that were operated very closely and Thomas's Hindu article that talks about, talks about how it happened that Jordan meets Tata and that's where it sort of the whole thing starts from. So all of this history is fascinating because also a lot of the Malwa intermediaries become also later on important as industrial houses. So I think that history needs to be... You also got to understand, you talk about the Malwa region, it continues to be a very major OPM growing region in India even now where a large amount of OPM smuggling and illicit trade is also continuing. If you actually try to understand the historical and the social footprint of OPM trade, very little is known about it in India. What can we actually decipher that who are the people who are part of the OPM trade both in terms... I'm not talking only about the export which is going on to China but also about what was the situation as far as domestic consumption was concerned pre-British and during the British period also. I think that OPM was used widely but it was never a major element in terms of what you saw in China for instance. It really mass enslavement to OPM as an economic force of imperialism. So that organized difference that distributed OPM use, gaja, hash and all that. That's been a part of Indian culture that in fact is not the major economic driver. It is the cost of OPM which is what bankrupts China and this huge flow that takes place from China into Europe takes place mainly through the British. So that is the imperialist footprint of OPM in China. That is not so important in India. That's also what Robert says that was also important to register that British grew OPM in the Bengal Presidency, UPNR. Malwa it was decentralized, it was grown locally, it was procured by intermediaries, went to Bombay for export, also goad Daman in view from which it was also smuggled and Bombay. Daman became a major port from where it was and in fact there's a smuggling from Bombay into also into Portuguese ports that take place over there. But the impact on Indian people, OPM as an addictive substance was not there. We already had the British and they were also interested in introducing tea in India from which they made money. So the implications of all this go much deeper. How did British, enslaved China and India, of course China, other imperial countries were also there. So I think that's a very interesting history that we need to bring back because China and India at the time that Manuel talks about were the two richest countries in the world in terms of the trade, what they produced and what goes out to the world. If you see what's called the GDP figures, if we translate them, these are the two largest economies. India gets deindustrialized once cotton extents come from Britain and you get a reverse post industrial revolution but that's a lot later. That's really a part of the industrial revolution if you see takes this in the second half of the 19th century. That's a lot later than the period we are discussing at the moment. So the first part of it really comes from loot of these countries, use of opium and then of course the slave trade. These are the drivers of what we see transformation of mercantile empires then into industrial empires and then reversal of trade from what was buying from these countries selling it to Europe and other markets and then reversal that we then get deindustrialized in India because of the importance of textile. Thomas what we are definitely seeing through in the course of this discussion that the opium trade had devastating effect on the Indian economy and on the lives of the people of this country also. Despite that in the 20th century when the national movement picks up, opium does not in any way cast its shadow on the nationalist discourse which takes place. If we actually look at the major writings and the speeches of various nationalist leaders Gandhi included, we find a fairly strong position on alcohol. It comes from a much more moralistic position on alcohol but it's completely absent as far as opium is concerned. Partly is it because of what Prabir was referring to as being part of a culture. If we actually, I do not know about the rest of the country but at least as far as North India is concerned you know this entire phrase of Afim Chatna is very much part of everyday vocabulary. You know having you know licking of a spot of opium and it's considered to be absolutely normal in many sections of society even now. You have looked at as to why opium and its mention was not there within the nationalist discourse can you just tell us a bit more about it. Yeah like like Prabir said opium was never like its ills were never really felt in India on any kind of mass scale but it was not a commodity in that sense. Here it remained in the realm of like a folk practices things like that. So unlike alcohol which yeah the nationalist movement found used as a very safe way to criticize the British. In some sense the fact that the British had a temperance movement going on in Britain at the same time legitimized that you could use you could criticize the same things in India you know in a way that you couldn't do with other things. So and even when the so the the nationalists discovered the opium kind of like problem very late and even when they do they don't see it as a moral question like they look at that revenue and they see it in the in a very similar logic to the British. They are worried about that loss of revenue like we're going to become this fledgling new nation can we afford to like lose this source of revenue. Are we just bankrupting ourselves on some kind of like you know some sort of like silly model issue and but I think I mean Gandhi to some extent you know does see it as a moral issue kind of later on and he clubs it with alcohol. But I think in the end it is broader international forces it's the fact that China is kind of pushing back against it and you know as the 20th century kind of like moves on there is this there is international consensus that opium is a dangerous drug and should be controlled and things like the beginning of the like the League of Nations and those convention things like that's essentially what it's it's from there that the nationalists take their cue that they can start like talking about. Okay Praveer I would like your views on this you know the complete absence of opium you know and the negative impact it was having on Indian people and society and in the economy from the nationalist discourse you know and as what Thomas was saying you know that national cities are actually worried that if you actually take a position we are if you become independent we are going to lose this major source of revenue. You see at that point of time even for the British opium had ceased to be a major source of revenue because in the early 20th century the Chinese had pushed back and even within Britain there was an anti opium there was a very strong move strong anti opium movement talking about China. So but that didn't have an effect on India. No I'm coming to you. So if you take both of this together opium trade has falls off drastically and also there is Chinese opium coming into the market and that pointed them. They start growing. They start growing. So all of this put together it became not a major issue for the British but when you talk about alcohol alcohol is a major economic issue particularly for the middle class because they get bankrupted with the alcohol addiction not with opium or gaja addiction. So I think there's a big purely because of costs involved. I think there is a large element of cost involved because the middle class is small middle class. If they start getting addicted to alcohol it's a very big part of their income because it is still not really Indian made foreign liquor. So that that cost of alcohol compared to their household budget was still quite large. So this addiction was seen to be an economic danger for the middle class households. I still have anecdotal reference to my grandmother father's talking about these kind of things. I'm sure so do you. So given all of this I think it was seen to be much more of a middle class economic issue and not so much as an addiction moral issue as the others might be thinking about it later. What we are talking about is much later that you start getting a pushback on all of this. India signs all of these agreements lot later. In fact now that we have illegalized gaja. So there's a huge set of issues that how do you really handle all of this and while it is being now legalized elsewhere. So we are going in the opposite direction. So to say so all of these things I think the economic issue whether it is opium whether it is in alcohol. I think the economic issues really dominated a lot of this discourse and the manifest itself into moral issues only because the way movements are built up later on. I want to move away a bit away from the central opium issue in something which struck me while I was reading this book. This is something which I'd like to sound out Thomas also. We're talking about alcohol and it struck me suddenly that in India there has been a fairly strong history of agitations against alcohol in various parts of India. You had the Chief Minister of Bihar for instance very successfully running a prohibition program in Bihar. You talked about Praveed that how alcohol has affected the middle classes. Thomas this is something purely from one journalist to another one writer to another. Any ideas to actually look at this in a slightly more broader perspective in future? Let me try before Thomas comes in. I will talk about Gandhi and the national movement when it's a middle class issue. Now it's also the issue. It's also the working class. It's also the working class also the poor because with Indian made foreign liquor as well as the desi liquor that is a much bigger issue and let's not forget it's industrial scale production while all others are still not industrial scale production therefore they're decentralized so that's why it's become a more economic issue. I think to some extent it has always been a working class issue because not just alcohol but all of these addictive substances. It's not just the British who like learned how to use them. There is this sense of say plantation workers. There is this like sensory long practice of plantation workers that you fire them. They are forced to do kind of like back breaking labor and to kind of dull the pain of that back breaking labor you sell them alcohol, opium, things like that and then you charge them for it. You dock it from their wages and at the end of the month it turns out that they're in debt to you rather than you having to hold them a salary so there is this long tradition of using addictive substances as ways of like extracting value from working class people. That's very important also when you come to West Indies for the Caribbean because that was also the role of molasses and ram and that whole thing on cycle is also there so I think that's a very important element that this is a way of also enslaving court and court the workers but Thomas, plantations, they really come with colonial discipline. It is not older than that this cycle of plantation and plantation workers. We have to also start winding up this discussion and I do not think Thomas it would be very appropriate on our part to not talk about opium in the present global context especially because of the centrality of opium and the crucial issue which is there in the world that is that of terrorism at that particular in this current situation. So would you tell us as to how you see the opium trade globally now? I know that we are all aware of how Afghanistan has become a major center of illegal opium production and how is it looking ahead? Yeah, like you said I think the understanding is that currently Afghanistan is responsible for about 90% of illegal opium production and opium is the raw material for drugs like heroin. Not all opioids are derived from opium many of them are synthetic but heroin for example is one that is and yeah I think over the last 30 years the keys areas of where opium has been produced and has been kind of like integrated into terrorism global kind of organized crime like has shifted at one point. They used to call it the golden triangle which was near Thailand, Myanmar and then you know they used to talk about the golden near Iran and places like that but yeah now it's Afghanistan and there is this sense that that kind of arose out of the vacuum that was left after CIA and kind of like American funding I'm going to interrupt you here because the rise of actually opium accompanies the American incursion into Afghanistan in the 80s. I'm talking about much more recent than that post 2011 because they support the warlords who were very much into opium trade actually stopped it in its first phase. The warlords. So the resurgence of opium that we see internationally and from Afghanistan comes from because of American policies in the last 20 years. American support to warlords. It is basically blessed by the Americans as a cheap way of controlling Afghanistan and alliances, local alliances they're forced there but I would like to go back even earlier when you talk about Thailand and those areas a lot of people was out of the Vietnam War because again the CIA is involved in all of this drug trade is there as is also the narco trade in America. Other part of it is in fact when you talk of opiates and Thomas referred to opiate issue today has also shifted to the drug companies. I'm not talking of Coca-Cola. The pharma companies. Pharma companies are not talking of Coca-Cola here who initially also sold cocaine mixed dish in Coca-Cola it is said but it is that's why it was named for but the point that comes up is the fact that it is also the opiate crisis in the United States because this industrial scale production of opiates but so therefore this becomes a much larger issue but let's be very clear Afghanistan both in the at the time of what was called the soviet incursion 1980s when Americans and the last 20 years. 20 years the Americans have been deeply implicated and blaming Afghanistan without taking cognizance of this would be wrong. So we are seeing you know a continuity that in the 18th and 19th century it was British imperialism and now it is American imperialism which is behind the globalization of the opium trade is that the right way of saying it I would say yes and the other part of this it cannot be fought in the way this is talked to be this is being fought we have to think of different ways of looking at how to fight addiction and I think that's a different that's a completely different thing that's not something you can have today. You're concluding comments Thomas on this what Praveer has said you know especially about and how we concluded by saying you know that imperialism to a certain extent has been behind the widespread nature of the opium trade. I think it the sort of the cloak of secrecy that kind of shrouds the American intelligence agencies makes it hard to talk about these things but yeah undoubtedly you can see their fingerprints in so many of wherever opium is involved in the modern day for sure so yeah it is and like Praveer said there's a question of like how generally like these drugs are thought of today in terms of like the medical paradigm of seeing them as addiction and then criminalizing it especially in India like in India there is a certain amount of opium that can be legally produced and yet we still sort of like we have we have some kind of epidemic in places like Punjab and things like that which has been kind of like handled extremely badly a lot of people like find themselves in jail without any kind of like recourse for long periods of time so yeah this is also like a justice issue. Right well thank you very much for having participated in this discussion congratulations on your book and wish you the best luck for it thank you Praveer also for you know being very illuminative in these in this discussion and coming up with very sharp points I hope that you have enjoyed this discussion and found it particularly enriching thank you very much