The role of Opium in 18th Century British Empire

The role of Opium in 18th Century’s British Empire.Guillermo Pineda

Essay

Question: What role did the production and commerce of opium played during the 18th century to strengthen the British Empire's control over India?

Subject: Opium

Theme: The role that opium played during the 18th Century to strengthen the power of the British Empire in India.

China opened to foreign trade under the Qing Dynasty via Guangzhou (Canton).

By 1690s, traders from the British East India Company began shipping Tea to supply British demand!

Chinese were only interested in silver and not in British commodities.

WHAT TO DO?

17th Century trade

British traders’ solutionOpium became THE high-value commodity for which China was not self sufficient.

The British traders had been purchasing small amounts of opium from India for trade since Ralph Fitch first visited in the mid-sixteenth century.1

Trade in opium was standardized, with production of balls of raw opium, 1.1 to 1.6 kilograms, 30% water content, wrapped in poppy leaves and petals, shipped in chests of 60-65 kilograms.1 Chests of opium were sold in auctions in Calcutta with the understanding that the independent purchasers would then smuggle it into China.

1. Carl A. Trocki (2002). Opium as a commodity and the Chinese drug plague.

What happened?1760s:1,000 chests of opium (each weighing 63.64 Kg.) were smuggled into China

1800s: gradually increased to 4,000 chests.

1824: increase dramatically to over12,000 chests.

1830: rising to 19,000 chests.

1835: 30,000 chests.

1838: 40,000 chests (2,500 tons of opium) in 1838.(2)

The British encouraged poppy growing. By the end of the 1830s (less than a century later) the opium trade was already, and was to remain, "the world's most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century.” (3)

(2) Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800-1842 (Monthly Review Press; Cambridge University Press 1951) p. 232.(3) Frederic Wakeman, "The Canton Trade and the Opium War” p. 172. cited in John K. Fairbanks. The Creation of the Treaty System. The Cambridge History of China vol. 10 Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 213.

1760 1800 1824 1830 1835 18380

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Chart Title

Opium Trade

• A chest of opium was worth nearly $1,000 in 1800.• In 1980, 2,000 tons of opium supplied all legal and illegal uses. By

2002, the opium production was 5,000. • In 2002 the price for one kilogram of opium was $300 for the farmer,

$800 for purchasers in Afghanistan, and $16,000 on the streets of Europe before conversion into heroin.

Bellin, J.N. Old Antique map of the Gulf of Bengal] Carte du Golphe de Bengale. Amsterdam, c. 1760. http://www.antiquemaps-fair.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=634_640_661_775&products_id=19618

1st they needed to control Awadh and the territories to

the SoutheastAwadh was known as the granary of India and was important strategically for the control of the Doab, the fertile plain between the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers.

It was a wealthy kingdom, able to maintain its independence against threats from the Marathas, the British and the Afghans.

Ruled by the Nawabs who were a Persian Shia Muslim dynasty from Nishapur.

British Action I - 1757 Battle of Plassey

Allies: British Army leaded by Lord Robert Clive (Clive of India) + Mir Jafar (Became the Nawab of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa)

Against: Siraj ud-Daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal Subah and the French East India Company

Effect: Company rule over South Asia which expanded over much of the Indies.

The battle took place at Palashi, Bengal (Plassey is the anglicised version of Palashi), on the river banks of the Bhagirathi River, about 150 km north of Calcutta, near Murshidabad, then capital of undivided Bengal.

950 British soldiers + 2,100 indian sepoy; against 35,000 Indian infantries, 18,000 cavalry men and 50 French artillerymen

Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757, by Francis Hayman. National Portrait Gallery of London. 

British Action II - 1764 Battle of Buxar

7,000 soldiers under the command of the British East India Company (857 British, 5,297 Indian sepoys and 918 Indian cavalry) against 40,000 combined armies of Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal; Shuja-ud-Daula Nawab of Awadh; and Shah Alam II, the Mughal Emperor.4

The battle was a decisive victory for the British East India Company that got the control for the Company to collect and manage the revenues of almost 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) (Modern: West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and part of Bangladesh)

4 Ness and Stahl. Western Imperialist Armies in Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Afterwards,The British East India Company gained the power to act as diwan of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. This allowed the company to pursue a monopoly on opium production and export in India, to encourage riots to cultivate the cash crops of indigo and opium with cash advances, and to prohibit the "hoarding" of rice.

This strategy led to the increase of the land tax to 50% of the value of crops, the starvation of ten million people in the Bengal famine of 1770, and the doubling of East India Company profits by 1777.

Beginning in 1773 the British government began enacting oversight of the company's operations, culminating in the establishment of British India in response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Bengal opium was highly prized, commanding twice the price of the domestic Chinese product, which was regarded as inferior in quality.

By the end of the 18th Century , the East India Company would become one of the largest companies in the world, with a private navy, army and civil service larger than that of some small countries.

In due course its import duties supplied 10% of Britain’s national income.

Apart from Opium they traded cloth from India, tea from China and then from its own plantations in India.

By 1765, under the leadership of John Calland they had already 17,000 troops in Bengal. 50years later the Company's armies in India consisted of a quarter of a million men, although the vast majority were sepoy.

Global Effects in the 18th Century

18th century expansion was also happening across the Atlantic.

The rising demand of tea pushed for a higher demand of sugar + sugar required plantations + which required slave labour.

Tea imports carried by the East India Company rose from 9 million lbs. in the 1720s to 37 million by the 1750s.

In 1700 the British imported 23,000 tons of sugar. By 1800 the import level was 245,000 tons, much of which went into tea.

So, the demand from the Carribean plantations was clearly sufficient to generate its own slave-trading companies and sell opium to China in order to reduce its deficit.

Opium stopped being a British business by the end of the 18th Century.

Competition came from the United States, which began to compete in Guangzhou (Canton) selling Turkish opium in the 1820s.

Portuguese traders also brought opium from the independent Malwa states of western India, although by 1820 the British were able to restrict this trade by charging "pass duty" on the opium when it was forced to pass through Bombay to reach an entrepot.

Despite drastic penalties and continued prohibition of opium until 1860, opium importation rose steadily from 200 chests per year under Yongzheng to 1,000 under Qianlong, 4,000 under Jiaqing, and 30,000 under Daoguang. The illegal sale of opium became one of the world's most valuable single commodity trades, and has been called "the most long continued and systematic international crime of modern times”.

Global Effects in the 18th Century

By the 19th CenturyIn response to the ever-growing number of Chinese people becoming addicted to opium, Daoguang of the Qing Dynasty took strong action to halt the import of opium.

In 1838 the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests of opium in Guangzhou (Canton).

The British, who were not willing to replace the cheap opium with costly silver, began the First Opium War in 1840, winning Hong Kong and trade concessions in the first of a series of Unequal Treaties.

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