Opium and Empire

Opium and Empire
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 279
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781501746352
ISBN-13 : 1501746359
Rating : 4/5 (52 Downloads)

Synopsis Opium and Empire by : Carl A. Trocki

Breaking new ground in the historiography of the overseas Chinese and British colonialism, this book focuses on two areas largely ignored by students of the period—opium and the economic role of the group of institutions known as kongsi, or secret societies.

Opium and Empire

Opium and Empire
Author :
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages : 473
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780773596818
ISBN-13 : 077359681X
Rating : 4/5 (18 Downloads)

Synopsis Opium and Empire by : Richard J. Grace

In 1832 William Jardine and James Matheson established what would become the greatest British trading company in East Asia in the nineteenth century. After the termination of the East India Company's monopoly in the tea trade, Jardine, Matheson & Company's aggressive marketing strategies concentrated on the export of teas and the import of opium, sold offshore to Chinese smugglers. Jardine and Matheson, recognized as giants on the scene at Macao, Canton, and Hong Kong, have often been depicted as one-dimensional villains whose opium commerce was ruthless and whose imperial drive was insatiable. In Opium and Empire, Richard Grace explores the depths of each man, their complicated and sometimes inconsistent internal workings, and their achievements and failures. He details their decades-long journeys between Britain and China, their business strategies and standards of conduct, and their inventiveness as "gentlemanly capitalists." The commodities they marketed also included cotton, rice, textile goods, and silks and they functioned as agents for clients in India, Britain, Singapore, and Australia. During the First Opium War Jardine was in London giving advice to Lord Palmerston, while Matheson was detained under house arrest at Canton in the spring of 1839, an incident which helped prompt the armed British response. Moving beyond the caricatures of earlier accounts, Opium and Empire tells the story of two Scotsmen whose lives reveal a great deal about the type of tough-minded men who expanded the global markets of Victorian Britain and played major roles in changing the course of modern history in East Asia.

Opium and the Limits of Empire

Opium and the Limits of Empire
Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Total Pages : 408
Release :
ISBN-10 : STANFORD:36105114190049
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (49 Downloads)

Synopsis Opium and the Limits of Empire by : David Anthony Bello

This book examines the Chinese opium crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators.

Empires of Vice

Empires of Vice
Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Total Pages : 330
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780691199702
ISBN-13 : 0691199701
Rating : 4/5 (02 Downloads)

Synopsis Empires of Vice by : Diana S. Kim

A Shared Turn : Opium and the Rise of Prohibition -- The Different Lives of Southeast Asia's Opium Monopolies -- "Morally Wrecked" in British Burma, 1870s-1890s -- Fiscal Dependency in British Malaya, 1890s-1920s -- Disastrous Abundance in French Indochina, 1920s-1940s -- Colonial Legacies.

Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia

Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia
Author :
Publisher : Springer
Total Pages : 187
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781137317605
ISBN-13 : 1137317604
Rating : 4/5 (05 Downloads)

Synopsis Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia by : A. Wright

This study investigates the connections between opium policy and imperialism in Burma. It examines what influenced the imperial regime's opium policy decisions, such as racial ideologies, the necessity of articulating a convincing rationale for British governance, and Burma's position in multiple imperial and transnational networks.

Imperial Twilight

Imperial Twilight
Author :
Publisher : Vintage
Total Pages : 609
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780307961747
ISBN-13 : 0307961745
Rating : 4/5 (47 Downloads)

Synopsis Imperial Twilight by : Stephen R. Platt

As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy

Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 226
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781135118990
ISBN-13 : 113511899X
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Synopsis Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy by : Carl Trocki

Drug epidemics are clearly not just a peculiar feature of modern life; the opium trade in the nineteenth century tells us a great deal about Asian herion traffic today. In an age when we are increasingly aware of large scale drug use, this book takes a long look at the history of our relationship with mind-altering substances. Engagingly written, with lay readers as much as specialists in mind, this book will be fascinating reading for historians, social scientists, as well as those involved in Asian studies, or economic history.

The Opium Wars

The Opium Wars
Author :
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Inc.
Total Pages : 349
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781402252051
ISBN-13 : 1402252056
Rating : 4/5 (51 Downloads)

Synopsis The Opium Wars by : W Travis Hanes III, Ph.D.

A fascinating look at the other side of the Opium Wars In this tragic and powerful story, the two Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 between Britain and China are recounted for the first time through the eyes of the Chinese as well as the Imperial West. Opium entered China during the Middle Ages when Arab traders brought it into China for medicinal purposes. As it took hold as a recreational drug, opium wrought havoc on Chinese society. By the early nineteenth century, 90 percent of the Emperor's court and the majority of the army were opium addicts. Britain was also a nation addicted—to tea, grown in China, and paid for with profits made from the opium trade. When China tried to ban the use of the drug and bar its Western smugglers from it gates, England decided to fight to keep open China's ports for its importation. England, the superpower of its time, managed to do so in two wars, resulting in a drug-induced devastation of the Chinese people that would last 150 years. In this page-turning, dramatic and colorful history, The Opium Wars responds to past, biased Western accounts by representing the neglected Chinese version of the story and showing how the wars stand as one of the monumental clashes between the cultures of East and West. "A fine popular account."—Publishers Weekly "Their account of the causes, military campaigns and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre and deeply unsettling."—Booklist

Opium Regimes

Opium Regimes
Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Total Pages : 470
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0520222369
ISBN-13 : 9780520222366
Rating : 4/5 (69 Downloads)

Synopsis Opium Regimes by : Timothy Brook

Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.

AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire

AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire
Author :
Publisher : iUniverse
Total Pages : 486
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781450201711
ISBN-13 : 1450201717
Rating : 4/5 (11 Downloads)

Synopsis AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire by : Nancy Turner Banks

It is a mistake to think that wars only concern armies involved in active engagement. Nothing is farther from the truth. The real forces of evil wage a financial war. The dark princes of debt finance have gained leverage over every important social, economic, and political institution-including the health care delivery system. In AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire, author Nancy Turner Banks draws the connections between free market strategies, the destruction of national sovereignty by the process of globalization, and AIDS as one of the health consequences of a neo-Darwinian philosophy. Through meticulous research, Banks found a medicalpharmaceutical- industrial complex that was taken over one hundred years ago by the titans of financial capitalism. Their aim was to create profit, not to conquer disease. This book of social history points to a cauldron of historical events that contributed to the HIV/AIDS crisis. AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire tells the dramatic story of a financial ideology that is damaging to everything that it means to be human. It is the story of profits over people. In the end, it is the story of hope and how we can regain our sanity and our health in a world gone mad.