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Opium

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Opium is the dried latex of Papaver somniferum, an addictive narcotic that the East India Company organised as a monopoly crop in Bengal, principally around Patna and Benares, with a competing Malwa production shipped from Bombay. Its import into China was illegal under Qing law, so the Company did not carry it itself: it auctioned the drug in Calcutta to private 'country' traders who smuggled it to the China coast, keeping the Company's Canton tea business formally clean. Imports rose from a few thousand chests a year in the 1820s to over 30,000 by 1830 and roughly 40,000 by 1839. The trade reversed the flow of silver, funded the tea purchase, and produced mass addiction in China — which is what the Qing prohibition campaign of 1839 was responding to.

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Evidence · 2
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 2
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 38 blocks · 2 evidence · 35 related

  1. Story
  2. Opium is the dried latex of Papaver somniferum, an addictive narcotic that the East India Company organised as a monopoly crop in Bengal, principally around Patna and Benares, with a competing Malwa production shipped from Bombay. Its import into China was illegal under Qing law, so the Company did not carry it itself: it auctioned the drug in Calcutta to private 'country' traders who smuggled it to the China coast, keeping the Company's Canton tea business formally clean. Imports rose from a few thousand chests a year in the 1820s to over 30,000 by 1830 and roughly 40,000 by 1839. The trade reversed the flow of silver, funded the tea purchase, and produced mass addiction in China — which is what the Qing prohibition campaign of 1839 was responding to.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
  5. Silver
  6. Opium
  7. Connections
  8. English (later British) East India Company
  9. Silver
  10. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
  11. Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
  12. The Opium Wars
  13. Tea
  14. The Columbian Exchange
  15. Manila
  16. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
  17. Opium
  18. Qing trade confined to Canton
  19. Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
  20. The Opium Wars
  21. Treaty of Nanking
  22. Potosí
  23. Silver ore is registered at the Cerro Rico of Potosí
  24. Manila is founded as the eastern terminus
  25. Mercury amalgamation and the mita transform Potosí
  26. Tea
  27. Cohong (Gonghang)
  28. Silver
  29. Opium
  30. Shanghai
  31. Qing trade confined to Canton
  32. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
  33. Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
  34. The Opium Wars
  35. Treaty of Nanking
  36. Evidence
  37. The Anglo-Indian opium trade, organised as a Bengal monopoly and sold on to private smugglers, rose from a few thousand chests annually in the 1820s to roughly forty thousand by 1839 and reversed the silver flow that had funded tea purchases.
  38. The Company's Canton trade, its tea purchases and cargo accounting, and its administrative decision-making are documented in a single surviving institutional archive.
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