By Caroline Pychynski
As part of the Bhisé Global Understanding Project, Adelphi University welcomed award-winning author Amitav Ghosh on Oct. 1 to discuss the history of the opium trade and how that continues to affect the international order. The focus of the lecture, led by Craig Carson, associate dean for Academic Affairs for the Honors College, was to learn about a new dimension in the history of colonialism. The talk was titled “The Poppy Flower and the Butterfly Effect: History of the Opium Trade and Contemporary Globalism.”
Ghosh, who won the Jnanpith Award in 2018 (India’s highest literary honor), explained that opium is an ancient narcotic that humans have depended on for thousands of years for both recreational and medicinal use. “To understand the opium trade, which is expensive and laborious, is to understand how wealth and money were created back then,” he said.
The Dutch were the first to begin trading opium at a large scale, followed by the British. After gaining control of India’s opium industry, the British East India Company proceeded to earn record profits.
Indian laborers suffered a tremendous human cost as a result of this, Ghosh explained. “One-tenth of the population in Ghazipur was employed by the Ghazipur factory center,” he said. “It’s a very manual production. Basically, they were producing opium by hand. And this is a real tragedy. The people doing this work — impoverished workers, impoverished peasants — producing the most lucrative object.”
Indians, however, were not the only people to suffer as a result of this trade. Ghosh said much of the opium produced in India was smuggled into China by the British, which resulted in “disaster and widespread addiction.”
The United States also played a role in this history. Ghosh found that although the US government was not directly involved in the opium trade, American involvement in the opium wars enabled private opium merchants–which Ghosh described as “early capitalists”--to accumulate vast wealth by smuggling opium from Turkey into China.
Ghosh mentioned that the rich architecture of that time period is often connected to the suffering of India and China. An example is the Samuel Wadsworth Russell House in Connecticut, now owned by Wesleyan University. Samuel Russell, the original owner, had economic ties with Britain and played a significant role in the opium wars. He profited from purchasing opium produced in India and having it sold in China.
“This house was made with substances [opium] that were made by impoverished Indians and used by impoverished Chinese,” said Ghosh.
After the lecture, first-year nursing major Betzy Salmeron said, “I thought the lecture was incredibly engaging and eye-opening. He [Ghosh] did a fantastic job of unraveling the complexities of the opium trade and showing how it was tied to the horrors of colonialism.”
Martin R. Haas, a professor of American history in the College of Arts and Sciences, said, “Dr. Ghosh brilliantly connected the history of the past with contemporary issues of globalization. In this case, with an emphasis on the American role in the globalized 19th century opium trade.”
The Bhisé Global Understanding Project is an inclusive initiative exploring critical global issues and preparing the next generation of global thinkers and leaders. Future events are planned to engage the Adelphi community in global issues.