My Take | Opium trade was integral to British imperialism

In William Dalrymple’s highly readable The Last Mughal, there is an informative footnote on page 102: “In northern India … opium addiction seems to have been a major problem. Since the [East India] Company had the monopoly on the growing and trade in the substance, which by the 1850s provided an astonishing 40 per cent of their exports from India, it of course made no attempt to control the problem.”

A decade earlier, the company was instrumental in getting the British government to launch a war halfway across the globe, in China, to protect and expand the opium trade. But long before Britain first diplomatically approached China, the company had taken over much of the Indian subcontinent.

It used its Crown monopoly to deindustrialise once prosperous Bengal and, through a combination of coercion and monetary inducement, forced many farmers to switch from growing staple crops to opium poppies.

As a result, the company synonymous with gunboat diplomacy was directly responsible for the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. That man-made disaster killed roughly 10 million people – a third of the local population – and was only the first in a series of Indian famines under British rule. You can trace a direct line from the famine in India to the war in China. The former was partly caused by opium production, the latter by its markets.

The last mass famine under British rule, in 1943, was also in Bengal, which killed about 3 million. It was partly caused by Winston Churchill who despite repeated warnings, insisted on exporting rice from India to other parts of the British Empire to sustain its war efforts. For all his famously witty quotes, this one wasn’t funny when he blamed the famine on Indians “breeding like rabbits”.

People in Hong Kong waving the colonial flag should think twice about British imperialism being benign or even beneficial.