Review of 'Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma'

The history of narcotics in Asia in the last century and a half has been the subject of considerable controversy and significant revision over the last 20 years or so.Recent restatements of the view that had prevailed throughout the 20th century include Carl Trocki's influential Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy.(1)This view held that British imperialists, and to a lesser extent other European powers, set out to finance their interests in Asia by forcing intoxicants and narcotics on local populations.He called the British who traded opium between their possessions in India and the Chinese empire 'a global drug cartel which enslaved and destroyed millions and enriched only a few'.For this school of thought it was clear that western imperialists compelled colonised peasants to produce large quantities of dangerous drugs to force upon guileless Asian populations that were poisoned for profit.Emdad-ul Haq even went as far as to claim that contemporary drug problems in parts of south Asia could directly be linked to this trade.