Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895

The primary aim of this article is to take a fresh look at the massive report of the Royal Commission on Opium of 1895. This document is one of the great Victorian inquiries devoted to the Indian Empire. In it we see displayed the cultural tensions and conflicts negotiated between British colonizers and Indian colonized subjects.The author is indebted to Richard Newman for suggesting that the Royal Commission on Opium deserves reappraisal.Opium, like colonialism, is a sensitive and charged issue. The question of mood-altering drugs—opium, alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine, among others—is always fraught. Each society and culture is convinced that its own drugs of choice are normal and natural; and that those of other societies are depraved and unnatural. Generally each society and culture has drugs of choice that have been assimilated to its cultural practices. The pleasures of these familiar drugs are known; their dangers minimized by taboos and social rituals of consumption, and their damage contained and ignored. Similar adaptations in other cultures are invisible or, if seen, grotesque.