Empire: World History - 248. Victorian Narcos: Sex, Drugs, & The Opium Agency (Ep 2)

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

How did Britain create a violent monopoly on opium production in India in the 1700s? What was the Opium Agency? Why did Chinese elites use opium during sex?  Anita and William discuss how the East India Company competed with other traders to sell Indian opium to China despite it being outlawed…  _____________ Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com.  Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Lerunpool. Very good. Now, if you missed the first episode, what we have been talking about is the relationship of opium and cups of tea. Not an obvious one necessarily.

Well, I don't know how many of the people walk their dogs out there. In an opium, A's sipping cups of tea. A bit novel to us. But we were talking in the last episode about how tea had become such an overwhelming desire and product for the British. The British loved it so much. They were buying so much of it. They were spending so much money on it.

90% of cargo was tea. And so there's suddenly this thought that, hang on a minute, all of our money is leaving us to go to China. And they're not buying anything from us. And now this will sound quite familiar to anyone who's been listening, as William pointed out, last episode, to the kind of conversations going on about Trump tariffs. You know, if there isn't a balance of payments, how is this fair? And that starts occurring to the British. And I just wanted to read you something about, you know, how tea matters to the British. just to remind you, because as you know, I did matrol for really interesting things written about tea.

And this is slightly later. So this is William Gladstone, and I couldn't find the source of it, but it is attributed to him from some sort of 1800s tea books. They actually put this in from him. If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you're depressed, it will cheer you. If you're excited, it will calm you. So, you know, this love affair with tea, which is such a quintessentially, let's face it, British thing. I've just come back from, you know, France, but it's all about the coffee. Nobody wants to give you a cup of tea. I've just come back from Hong Kong and I'm sipping a very nice mug of, I think it's called Orchid Oolong, which I bought on my research there for this episode. Very nice and very fitting, considering in the last episode we talked about your ancestor who came up with this eureka moment.

So you know what? I have an idea. This is how we can balance our payments. What we could do is some kind of triangular trade where we give them stuff they want and then, you know, we get the tea maybe at a better rate, a better tariff. So he identifies your Alexander Derrimple ancestor that, you know what, we could probably do pepper because they like pepper in China and we could probably do opium because they're starting to like opium. And these are the seeds of what will become the opium war. We should say that this was just because he spotted

that the trade already existed. That Southeast Asian people were successfully trading their products. Literally what I said. But it wasn't like he was coming up with a new idea. It was an old idea that he just burned. They like it. They like the pepper. They like the opium.

Lordy. Anyway, but so this becomes an idea that will become the basis for a very important trade and a very bloody trade, it turns out. But before we get into all of that, before we get into all of that, I want you to tell us a bit about opium itself, because you sort of mentioned that David Cameron visit where they wore him and George Orsbourne wore poppies for Remembrance Day to China, not for one second thinking this is actually a symbol of the great

humiliation that China, you know, still reels from today. And it all went slightly bare-shaped or poppy shaped. Where do poppies actually come from? Tell us to the origin. of this opium trade? Improbably for something which is associated now very much in the Western mind with the East. You know, opium dreams, you know, brings to mind Kubla Khan and sort of Exotica. Afghanistan and, you know, sort of, you know, until recently the Taliban. Yeah, exactly. Taliban doing white poppies and people cutting that little slit in the poppy to let the ooze out and so on.

So probably the earliest example that has been discovered. of papava somniforum, which is specifically the opium poppy. He did that very well, by the way. It's very good. Thank you. Very good. Was, of all places, Switzerland. Poppies begin at Switzerland.

Which kind of makes sense if you think of, you know, I suppose, you know, the poppies of Flanders and this, you know, it is a European thing. It's not something that's necessarily associated with Turkey or China or... On many motorway verges, even today. Exactly. You'll see it. Yeah. that. And so the first place where specifically the opium poppy, the poppy which produces the opium,

was found in ancient lake beds in Switzerland, places like Lake Geneva. And lake dwellers living on Kranags, those sort of artificial islands that Iron Age people built into lakes. As early as 3,100 BC, were keeping supplies of poppy seeds, poppy sea cake and poppy capsules. And they were probably using it for its either medicinal or narcotic qualities. And we know that explicitly, once we get into the literate world of early Greece, and in the Mycenaean period, around 2000 BC, opium from opium poppies is being mixed with wine as part of a kind of shamanistic mother goddess cult. This is the cult of Demeter, isn't it?

mother of Cassidy. Exactly. I've read about those. Well done, yes. That's exactly right. And you get it very explicitly in the Odyssey. Helen mixes opium with wine to help warriors forget the passions and traumas of the Trojan War, all that sort of stuff. But Greek literature is full of references to the hallucogenic qualities of the poppy.

And it spreads apparently from Greece to Samaria. That's Mesopotamia. And from Mesopotamia, where you get references, for example, to the Assyrians using the stuff, it goes to Egyptians. Okay. So because in Egypt, I know that, I mean, Thibs was known for its opium fields, wasn't it? You know, there were vast expanses of growing opium. And there are descriptions in some of those Egyptian freezes of the white opium fields of Thebes. and they talk about Theban poppies.

But from there, probably with the Arabs, it spreads to India. And in India, it's used in war for the first time. People, the Rajputs in particular, specialize in this idea of taking opium before battle and then rushing into the thickest of the combat insensible to danger, which is something that still happens in our mogul. series, we were talking about those terrible massacres when the moguls take ramp and bore and so on. There's that institution of Jaha that they have when they think they're definitely going to be defeated and they can't win and they all put on orange or saffron clothing and rush out in a great sort of haze of glory. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, just on that, you know, I don't know if this is right or not, but we did talk about war elephants being given copious amounts of alcohol before they were. to go and rampage and run in unpredictable. I mean, any indication? I mean, no, genuinely, was it sort of a mixture of opium as well to sort of send them slightly, you know, de lally before they send them out? Yes, but it's very interesting that it's definitely it's being eaten. In India, opium is something you don't mix with drink and you don't smoke it, you eat it. And I've been served opium in Rajasthan by, it's still, if you go to one of those old-fashioned...

Sorry, you just drop that into a conversation like, Well, you know, that time I was offered opium. Yes, do go on. It's not done as a hallucogenic or a sort of, you know, drug frenzy thing. It's something in traditional Rajasani society to this day. Right. That when there's a wedding or there's a kind of fort, a ceremonial occasion when guests arrive and you want to honour them, you have this tea ceremony. And that happens also with, I've seen, I wrote one of my books in a Rajasthani fort near Jodhpur,

city of Jins, years and years ago. And even when parties of tenants were coming in from distant villages to the taco, the kind of local squire that I was staying with, I had a little room at the back where I was writing. And these peasants would come and he would give the – he'd hang up this thing that looked a bit like an old sock. And he put opium in it. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a bit. Okay.

So this is – I forgot all this. Yes, I do. Yes. But now I'm not going to let you forget because it's really interesting. So this opium that's offered, it's different to Bang, which is the stuff that people drink Holy, which is another, it's a narcotic that makes you sort of wild and carefree and lowers inhibition. So Hawley is the festival of colours, just for those who don't know. And you have this drink called Bung, which I've never had. But I've seen people who have. I've had quite a lot of bung over the years. God, it's confessions. Confessions of an opium eater has nothing on this podcast.

Bung is just hashish. It's just hash, that's right. That's what I thought. Hindi for hash, yeah. Which is a wild plant in India. I have great hedges full of the stuff growing outside my farm. I just feel that a cavity search is in your future when you come to London next. I mean, just mystical powers kicking in.

But when you were offered the opium in the sock, just to talk me through what that was. So the opium in the sock was how? I'm like, I'll tell you exactly what happened. So I remember this one particular occasion when there was a group of villages. I think I can't remember one. they were coming, but it was a formal visit by a group of village elders to this wonderful man who's dead now called Takosab, who's the local squire, and he received them formally in his reception room and everyone was sitting on the ground and water is poured into this sock

rather like making sort of tea. It's not actually a sock, it's kind of like a little cotton container. And he then spoons opium into each of them as a form of welcome. And I think that's an ancient ceremony. I think that's something that's been going on. So what happens? It had no effect on me at all because it's very small quantities. But no, to be honest, I'd pretend I'm sort of running in the ground and having strange hallucinations. But no, I mean, maybe a little bit sort of spaced out, but nothing, nothing dramatic.

I feel this is not much to do with history, but very interesting. Anyway, so it's prevalent spreads in India, sort of crossing over and just to move is sort of back to Europe and closer to where this, you know, the British get the hands on it and start thinking that this is a good commodity to trade and balance payments with China. The Portuguese are also sort of rumbling around India, you know, sort of overlapping slightly. And it is in 1509 when you've got the conquering of Goa that they're to place. And I take it that's when they too see, you know, oh, opium, hang on a minute, if they're exporting it, there's money, there's cash, it's a cash crop.

I mean, does it go back that far that the Portuguese start trading? The Portuguese, bizarrely, are in Goa earlier than the moguls. They precede the moguls. And the guy who conquers Goa for the Portuguese is a guy called Abukaki. And he arrives in India in 5009 and he writes to his boss, the king of Portugal. He says, if your highness would believe me, I would order poppies to be sewn in all the fields of Portugal's and command Afyam, as he calls it, to be made. We call it Afim. So we call it Afim is no phoom in Hindi. And all that comes from the region. Greek. It's basically versions of the Greek word. Right. And anyway, he says this Afiam is the best merchandise that obtains in these places, and this is the key quote, the people of India are lost

without it, if they do not eat it. So contrary to some accounts, there's some post-colonial scholars that say that this is basically a rackety British invention. And that's not true. It's certainly true that the British ramp it up to a completely unprecedented level.

But it's that their trade, like everything the British did, is based on mogul precedent. It wasn't just the British that realised this. And so which takes us to the question of why is it such a big deal in China? And the answer is sex, bizarrely, which isn't something that you perhaps necessarily associate. Well, yes, you do. Sex and drugs, we just don't have the rock and roll. That's all.

Yeah, sex and drugs and rock and roll, I suppose, yeah. So specifically, there is a whole thing in Ming China. Ming China is that the Ming dynasties are the kind of contemporaries of the moguls. and it's all about the art of sex and it's a kind of stinging Trudy Stiler kind of thing. It's tantric. It's the idea that it slows everything down. And opium does that apparently. Right.

I just bought a book, fun enough, about this, which is a whole book on Chinese opium. It's called The Social Life of Opium. And there's a whole chapter on the Ming obsess about this. It's obviously considered to be the height of cultural sophistication, just like, you know, the positions in the Kama Sutra are such a big thing in early India. Getting your opium into your sex life in the Chinese court is a big deal. Okay. So we've established that there is an appetite. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode. We also talked about how, you know, the Dutch were quick to jump on and, you know, the Portuguese had already jumped on.

But it's the British. So we talked about your ancestor, suggesting that this might be part of a triangular trade. But then Warren Hastings is the man who kind of wades in, isn't he? I mean, so Warren Hastings in 1773, who's then the governor general of India, sort of formalises his entry into the opium market. Talk about that, because I know you know an awful lot about Warren Hastings. So Alexander Drimpole and this idea of the triangular trade is contemporary with the young Robert Clive, 1740s. Yeah, okay. And of course, Clive changes the whole conception of things because he conquers Bengal.

and it's in Bengal, which at that period includes both modern Bangladesh and the modern Indian state of Bihar, as well as the modern state of West Bengal. It is in Bihar that the moguls had had the centre of their opium trade. So the British, as part of their expansion, not as part of a deliberate ploy, but through the battles of Placet in 1757 and Buxer, which is I think 1764, capture the big opium growing. headquarters of Mogul India. Without knowing really what they've got. I mean, they sort of, it's part of the territory. It's not them. Because before they conquer it, there's already East India Company factories in places like

Patna. And they're shut out of the opium trade because it's a mogul monopoly. And they're chafing at this because they want to be part of it and not allowed in. And then, of course, the moment comes when after. There's no barrier anymore. There's no barrier. And they swoop in. And at the same time as the British are,

You mentioned the Dutch. The Dutch have realized at the same time that this is a big deal, and the VOC, which is the Dutch East India Company, have started now trading opium to China from Java. And one of the beneficiaries of this in the mid-18th century is William of Orange, who we last saw at the Battle of the Boyne in the Irish series. wearing his Dutch hat, he becomes a member of a VOC club called the Afimian or the Opium Society, which basically is a kind of investing club where people put money in and they get narco cash out of it. And William of Orange is a member of this and he receives substantial number of shares from the Dutch East Indies. So the same time that the British are suddenly finding themselves ruling the main opium,

The Dutch have already realised that this is a big deal that they can make of money. I'm just sort of chuckling to myself because I can, you know, if there was a madman type advertising campaign, it would be, you know, opium stocks. The yield is high, so very high, higher that you can imagine. You're lost on advertising. But look, back, back previously on this conversation. So I want to know a little bit more about when London takes the idea of the triangular, you should be able. But look, back, back previously on this conversation. So I want to know a little bit more about when London takes the idea of the triangular, trade and decides to really push it and push it hard. Tell me when that happens. So something is happening at this period in China, which adds to the attractiveness of opium. Now, as you know, tobacco is part of the discovery of the new world, that people are growing and smoking tobacco in North and South America. And that travels with the Portuguese to Southeast Asia. And it's some point, people who've been eating and drinking opium drinks realize that opium is much,

much stronger and a completely different deal if you smoke it. And there's a whole sort of, just like with, you know, we were talking in the last episode about how tea has a whole tea ceremony attached to it. There's a whole business where you get raw opium, you dissolve it in water, you strain it in a copper vettle until it sort of thickens up. And then you roll a little ball of this syrupy, blackish substance called Jundu into an opium pipe. And this happens for the first time. Someone sort of invents this process in the mid-18th century. In China.

In China. I think it's Java originally. Yeah, in Southeast data, but it's exported pretty quickly to China. It's the clear image that we have largely thanks to Hollywood, but also, you know, written accounts of opium dens where this is exactly what happens. these pipes, people sitting around on low cushions with each other. Well, let me give you my most thrilling discovery, which I got from a wonderful book, which we haven't talked about the books we've been reading. At the top of the list, Amitav Ghosh's wonderful book, Smoke and Ashes,

which is a wonderful book on the Opium Wars. And he has this line, which I hand-reads, that the term hipster comes from this period because you lie in an opium dem on your hips. Your hip. That's it. Isn't that great? It is in most. It's one of those things you read in.

You go, come on, Amitha, that can't be true. That's come on, that's bullshit. But it's Amitha Gooseh. It's legit. Apparently, so you take a small ball of the stuff, you put it at the end of a needle, you put the needle into a flame, and then you put the flame, this sort of gungy, almost ignited, bubbling, little ball of opium into a pipe and you inhale it and it kind of knocks you out. It's the strongest possible way. And so for the first time, opium, which has already been a problem in India,

even in its eaten and drunken form, as we know from these pictures of addicts, becomes an epidemic. You get the world's first really serious opioid epidemic. So at the same time as the British are looking to China as a way of solving their balance of payments problem, by, you know, pure, well, if you like good fortune for the British, terrible fortune for the Chinese, there is a massive increase in demand because suddenly you've got, just like with the opioid epidemic, with the sacklers and fentanyl and all that stuff in America 10 years ago. So in mid-18th century China, you suddenly get a massive demand for opium. So all these different things are coming together randomly.

But you also have a backlash from governments. I mean, if you see, you know, your youth largely, your youth incensate and, you know, just the terrible problems that go along with opium addiction in particular, because it is so addictive, don't the Chinese actually say, you know what, we're not having this anymore? Don't they ban opium at one point in China? It seems that there's sort of different, there's horses for courses. Yes, officially it is banned and you do have sporadic attempts. Yeah, 1729. I thought they said it's against the law. You're not allowed to do it anymore. Even at the court, apparently, and even some of the emperors as young men are taking this. These hipsters are taking it. And it's associated, as I say, with sort of courtly sex.

It's something that sophisticated young men like to do. Yeah. But there's a law against it, but the rich and the powerful can circumvent. Don't bother with the law. Exactly that. So no different from today in that sense. But that's when, I guess, it's 1729. I mean, when the ban comes in, that you get that whole image of the dens, you know, that people sort of,

if it is against the law, you'll have to go to the back streets or you'll have to go somewhere else. You're sort of seedy areas of drug taking, which in many ways kind of makes it worse because it's happening out of sight. And so, you know, the addiction problem is voracious and you can't stop it. It's like playing whackamol if it's all in the back streets and you can't really sort of keep up with it. So this is going on simple days. So we've got several different things happening. You've got, on one hand, the British have conquered the opium. growing areas of India. Secondly, the Javanese stroke, the Dutch, have found that there is a new way

to take opium as a smoke and an epidemic breaks out in China. And it's in 1773, you mentioned Warren Hastings. He's the guy who pulls all these different chords together. And in 1773, he takes over the monopoly, historians dispute this. I think that the moguls did have a monopoly on opium growing, and Shah Alam, the emperor who I read about in the anarchy, certainly thinks that they do. And Hastings, who's a historian and a scholar of Persian, discovers this and uses it as a legal pretext to take a monopoly control of the opium, of the areas that the company now controls. Now, as far as he's concerned, And this is just a way of shutting out the French and the Dutch merchants. And it also means that the farmers who you're getting it from have got less competition.

They can't play off the British against. They can't make a profit. You know, if the prices are fixed, you know, you've got only a monopoly, one person who's buying from you. You're kind of also at the mercy of the buyer. Because if the buyer says, right, I'm going to drop the price because, you know, we're the only one's buying. What are you going to do as a farmer? You're going to have to go along with it, if they're the only one. Exactly.

Warren Hastings makes it a monopoly in 7073. And then one of his successes is called Lord Cornwallis, who's the guy who's defeated by Washington in our American series, and then gets reappointed by the company and becomes Governor General in India twice. He takes the opium monopoly. He doesn't auction it out as Warren Hastings had done, but he forms a formal government agency in 1797

to control the growing of opium. And this makes it something which the East India Company, and by extension, the British government, have got a direct interest in. Is it just called the Opium Agency? It's called the Opium Agency. The Opium Agency will be on their calling cards. How extraordinary.

At the same time, the merchants in Canton begin to put two and two together. They're no longer doing this thing of stopping off in Southeast Asia, and maybe buying some opium as part of their package of goods that they're going to trade to the Chinese. They just take the opium direct from Bihar. They've got a monopoly. The foreigners are shut out.

The farmers have got no alternative but to sell to the government. It's a government exclusive monopoly. And a character called Mr. Wheeler, who, according to the East Indy Company papers, is, quote, an officer and an influential member of the community comes up with this idea to use the companies. own opium monopoly to balance the flow of silver out of India to China. Wheeler dealer. Wheeler dealer. Very nice. Very nice. So in 1767, Weiler dealer and Colonel Watson put this through the council in Calcutta and it becomes the formal policy. So from this point, you've got the opium agency, which is initially only about a million people.

are under its control. But in the course of the 19th century, and we'll see this in future episodes, it controls not just modern Bihar, but everything as far as agra. In other words, most of the Gadgetic plane gets given over to opium. And it becomes an absolutely massive deal. It's forbidden to everybody except people in this area, and they are given often no alternative but to grow open. And so even in times of famine, for example, people are still being told that they can't plant. Food. I mean, it's sort of a similar pattern that goes on with indigo later when Baha farmers in particular told to grow indigo because it's needed for the cotton trade for Cotonopolis in Manchester. Let's take a break and come back after the break because now that, you know, they've got the monopoly, they've got the supply.

And we've talked about the demand, even though a law has been passed in China. What happens when those two things meet? a ban on opium, but also a desire to sell opium to China. It's not going to end well, is it? Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the monopoly on opium production and distribution that the British have now taken on, thanks to Warren Hastings in India, and all of the territory that the British have won over and dominated in India, including these huge poppy growing areas, where farmers are given absolutely no choice about whether they're going to grow this cash crop or not, and often to the detriment to the people who,

you know, kind of need to feed themselves and their families. You know, no crops that you can eat, but crops that we can sell. So the scale of this, I just want to get, you know, the opium agency, which absolutely unashamedly calls itself, the opium agency, a new state body, if you like. What are they doing? Talk about the scale of business and what is going on under the aegis of that letterhead. It's massive, is the first thing to say. It is, and it's a bit like sort of homeland security in the United States. You know how the homeland security starts off as something after 9-11, which has its own sort of spirit. And when you come across Homeland Security at an American airport, they're much rougher and ruder than the normal officials.

And that's true. Can I just say that's another cavity search in your future? Like you're just like, when you come here and when you go there. Okay, just wear clean pants at all times. Carry on. Thank you very much. That's all right. On you go.

That's all right. Just here to help. Intervention. But the opium agency is its own department and has its own recruitment and people enter it for life. You go into the opium agency. It's a way of making a lot of money. But it's also, as with everything connected with narcotics throughout history, it's violent and rough.

And the opium agency now has. complete control of all opium dealing in India. All opium is supposed to be for the state and all sales are done through the state. And a whole business network gets set up whereby this agency of the government runs its own show. It has powers to enforce itself. So it can make threats. It harasses people who don't want to be involved in this. They always want to grow goods or grain or whatever else they want to grow. They're told they can't. They have to grow opium.

And it has a reputation for physical violence. So this business expands as their powers grow. They can break down doors. They can search houses. They can arrest people. And while it starts off as being about a million people in what we today would call Bihar, it spreads right through to Western UP, to virtually the vicinity of Agra. So not in Afghanistan, yeah.

I mean, that's really interesting. So it is around Bihar, which is not what we think of today. By the 80th, the early 19th century, you've got OPM being grown in Turkey, in the Ottoman Empire, around Smyrna. You've got it been grown around Shiraz in Iran. And I don't know for a fact, but I would imagine it must be grown in Afghanistan too. Well, the conditions are perfect for it. Yeah, but it is in East India Company, northern India, that it becomes this massive agribusiness. It comes a commodity which is controlled by the state.

And at its peak, which is, it won't be until the second half of the 19th century, so we're going ahead here. But at its peak, there's roughly half a million acres which are sewn with Poppy. and this requires the labour of more than 1.5 million small peasant households, which means as people have about four or five in every house, sometimes more, it's five to seven million people working this trade. It's only scattered farms in the West that do this, but it's very heavy in the east of the Gadgetic plain. And most of Bihar is given over to this.

And Amitav Ghosh, in his book, Smok and Ashes, suggests that, you know, the modern violence, and backwardness of Bihar to this day and Eastern UP is partly because it's been associated with this sort of rough agency which compels people to do things that they don't want to do, employs thugs, goes around beating people up if they don't obey. So he suggests that this area which today is renowned as being the most backward and least developed area of India,

that it is a colonial legacy of this. And then there's a whole separate story, which might come across later in this story, but which is worth just touching on now, Indian historians regard it as a form of resistance because the East India company's opium business is very highly regulated and it's all run by the state. But opium obviously is something that can make a profit for anyone. You don't have to be a part of the East India company and be from Bihar. And so another area of India, which has traditionally grown opium under the moguls, is a place called Malwa, which is kind of modern Madhya Pradesh going through to parts of eastern Rajasthan, all the way from indoor to Udaypur.

And this area is not under British control. It's still under the control of Indian princes who are in their domestic affairs independent of the British. So you get a rival consortium. If you like, the meddling cartel had rivals in other areas of Colombia and South America, which traded against it. So you find that the official East India Company opium agency has massive competition from the Malwa opium. And the Malwa opium is traded out of Gujarat and Bombay. And several historians have suggested that the growth of Bombay, which initially is the kind of ugly duckling compared to Madras and Calcutta, which are the most prosperous of the early East India Company settlements.

Bombay begins to really get going at this period. And several historians blame, not blame, but I suppose a tribute, the sale of Malwa opium. And this goes through often Parsi shippers. And so many of the big Parsi business houses grow rich through buying in from central India, from these princely states, the state of Indoor, under the whole. and the state, particularly of Mawa under what's now the Maharaja of Udaypo, that these guys are growing massive quantities of open in competition to the opium agencies of the East Indy company, and they're shipping them out in a rival consortium.

And they have a slightly different process, which is interesting. Well, I just wanted to say who the paris were. For those who don't know who the piracies were, I mean, they're Zoroastrians who come to India and settle and are hugely successful in business trading. they're mercantile people. And Mumbai is sort of founded on the industry of Parsi family. So when you hear here in Europe about the Tata family, they are Parsi. So even now, today, they have this sort of sense of being business magnets. And in the day and age that you're talking about, they have shipping. They have trade and shipping. That's what gives them the leverage to be involved so

prominently, particularly around Bombay. So these guys are sending agents out to what's now Udaipur and Indoor, buying up this opium. And the process is slightly different. Everyone likes the East India Company opium in China because it is not adulterated. No one's putting flour into it. Just like with cocaine today, there's all sorts of dodgy stuff going on putting up talc or chalk into cocaine. And that you get half the plots of half those things like the wire around this sort of business of adulteration. But the East India Company, which is a government monopoly, is consistent.

high-quality opium. But the process they use doesn't produce as much morphine. In other words, it doesn't have such a narcotic hit as the Malwa opium. And the thing that people think seems to make the difference is that the Malwa opium is left in linseed oil to sort of ferment, if you like, for nine or ten months. And this produces a higher morphine content. So although it's often adulterated and sometimes has flour and other stuff in it, it still gets you higher. Yeah, it gets you hire. Yeah. So there's these two rival businesses.

There's the East India Company Monopoly, which is grown in Bihar, auctioned in Calcutta. And then there's the Malwa Opium, which is run by Marwari and by Parsi businessman, which is coming out of Bombay. And the growth of Calcutta and the growth of Bombay both owe a great deal in this period to the opium trail. Fascinating. I mean, all over Bombay, actually, you see. the remnants of this. In things, for example, the J.J. School of Art, which is, you know, one of the most celebrated art schools in India, is grown by, I can't remember this one. It's Gigi Boy, JJ Gigi boy or a name like that. Who works with someone we're going to be talking about now, Jardine Matheson.

Okay, so Gigi Boy, again, is another Parsi family, a very old and sort of venerable Parsi family in India. Oh, Jardine Matheson. Now there's a name. There is a name. In fact, they were in the Financial Times this morning, I saw. Yeah, you sent me the article. I sent you the article. So what happens is that the company, by this stage, from the period of Warren Hastings, is partly a government agency already. And the company knows that the Chinese have now forbidden the sale of opium because it's now an epidemic in China. In fact, it turns out to be only the beginning of the epidemic. It gets worse. And so a decision is made at the highest level in India, that the company may be able to get away with growing the opium, but it can then auction it off in Calcutta and it isn't associated directly with the transport of opium to China. It's a change from the early period when the East India Company

was directly selling opium among many other things in Canton. From the beginning of the 19th century, there begins this process of opium auctions in Bonham. Bombay and Calcutta, and it is private merchants, often in association with the parties, who actually transport the opium in fast opium clippers to the China coast. And this is the moment that you get the entry of characters like Jardine and Matheson, who are going to talk about. Are we going to talk about them in the next episode, aren't we?

But they are still a really sort of powerful entity even today, which is why William had the Financial Times article about them. I think we're sort of drawing to a close here with this one. But just are we saying at this point when this entire industrialisation of the production and dissemination of opium, is it all bound for China? Is it all directed towards China? Or are we wheeling and dealing elsewhere as well? We're wheeling and dealing in all sorts of places.

But China is the big market. And China is also the place where people have the money, because of the tea trade, they have the money to buy it. And by the end of the 18th century, opium was the major export from India to China. When the moguls were involved in the trade, we had that figure, I think, of about 4,000 chests at the time of Akbar. And that remains more or less constant up to the 18th century, that about 4,000 chests have been produced in India. But in this period when people learn to smoke opium and it becomes massively more addictive, there is a colossal increase in the scale of the trade. And it moves from 4,000 chests in, say, the 1760s to 60,000 chests of opium

by the mid-19th century, by the outbreak of the opium wars, which is what we'll be coming up to later in this series. Opium is now China's major export from the outside world. It's the major concern of Europeans and other merchants gathered in places like Macau and Canton, these little purchase that European merchants have. And already the profits from opium not only offset the cost of the East India company's tea purchases, but even begin to reverse the centuries-old flow of silver into China. So for time immemorial, both India and China have been the recipient of Western gold and silver. This is the period when China begins to give out gold and silver to the West. This is the period, the brief moment when the West is richer than China. But it's also,

and this is the crucial link with our next episode, it's the realization by the Chinese authorities that they've got a problem. Not only have they got the social problem of these hipsters in their opium dems useless for a lot of the time, because they're in this hay. and they're being slowly killed off by this terrible narcotic that they've got addicted to. But it's also leading to a massive hemorrhage of silver bullion from China to the West. And this leads the Chinese to begin to control more and more tightly the trade of Europeans in India. And that, in turn, leads the British to want to open a formal embassy and open formal diplomatic relations with the Chinese court, which up to this point they haven't had.

There's never been a British ambassador to China. So this leads us to our next episode, which we'll be dealing with next time, the McCartney mission, the first British mission to China. And I don't think I'm spoiling any plot line by letting out at this point that it is a complete, an utter cock-up catastrophe embarrassment. I mean, it's funny. It's so bad. It's actually very funny. And if you want to hear it right here right now, don't blame you. It's such a corking story. You know what you have to do? Just join our club at Empirepoduk.com, Empirepodukuk.com, and you get early access to all of our little mini-series as we launched. This is one such.

But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durimple.