New York; March 8, 2024 — Last week, award-winning author Amitav Ghosh sat down with Princeton professor and former BBC journalist Razia Iqbal for a conversation about his latest book, Smoke and Ashes, which was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Foreign Policy, Literary Hub, and The Millions. Ghosh’s previous works have explored the intersection of capitalism, climate change, and colonialism — Smoke and Ashes is no different. 

The book provides a history of the global opium trade, a subject Ghosh had briefly touched on when he was writing the fictional Ibis trilogy. After six months of researching the impact the global opium trade had on India and China during the 1800s, Ghosh put down the project, overwhelmed with the grim nature of the subject. A couple years later, he came back to finish what he had started.

“After writing The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse, I actually came back to [Smoke and Ashes] because it is a story that needs to be told,” shared Ghosh. “It’s a kind of parable for what has happened in the modern world, in a sense. Just for the sake of profit — and this is what the Chinese said in the 19th century —  [Western companies] are willing to destroy the lives of millions of people.” 

According to Ghosh, it was the British “Opium Department” that took control of the trade in the East. The organization forced over a million peasant households into planting white opium poppies on their own land in India. European society was not unfamiliar with this systematic exploitation of labor: George Orwell was born on a poppy plantation in India, as his father was a sub-deputy opium agent. 

“It was the big European empires that sponsored the opium industry that actually invented the playbooks of what we now call denial,” said Ghosh. “Blame the user, blame the demand. They invented all these playbooks that were later adopted by the tobacco industry and energy corporations. There is a clear and direct line."

Ghosh notes that it wasn’t just the British Empire involved behind the global opium trade. After the Revolutionary War, when Americans couldn’t trade with the British, they turned to China to sell opium.  "There is something interesting that Americans have done that the British have not, which is that the trade in China has a place in American memory in a way that it doesn’t in the U.K.,” said Iqbal. American historians have produced extensive documentation of where opium money ended up, and profits from American involvement in the drug trade can be tracked back to some of the most prolific American families in the history of the Northeast.  

"It was a very small group of interconnected families [that profited]. Cabots, Lodges, Perkinses. Most notably, the Delanos. Andrew Delano was one of the most important opium traders of the 19th century and Andrew Delano’s daughter was the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is where all of the family money came from,” said Ghosh.

Smoke and Ashes explains how opium was primarily consumed in tonic form in India, but because it was smoked in China, it was much more addictive there. The Qing Dynasty banned opium as early as 1729 based on reports of how addictive the drug was from Chinese merchants in the Dutch East Indies. However, by the 1800s, as opium smugglers penetrated the Chinese market, addiction to the drug became a massive societal issue. By 1858, the British had forced the Chinese to legalize opium in the wake of the First and Second Opium Wars. 

“One of the continuities we see in the sort of circulation of opium is that once it begins to circulate it has this almost uncanny power of undermining structures of governance and creating these massive networks of corruption,” said Ghosh. “[The same thing] has happened in America. The really terrible thing about the opioid crisis that started with Purdue Pharma is that it completely undermined trust in the most trusted institutions of rural America. This is kind of an uncanny replay of what happened in China in the 19th century.”

Watch the full conversation here.