Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke

I have just finished reading River of Smoke, the second part of Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, and the sequel to Sea of Poppies.

As the titles suggest, these are novels about the opium trade in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Historical? Yes. Dry? Absolutely not. Ghosh has a huge talent for combining meticulous research with a wonderful sense of colour, character, and atmosphere. So these books are immensely enjoyable yarns.

But they also have some serious politics at their heart.

What do you do if you want to buy lots of someone else’s stuff, but they don’t want to buy so much of yours? What's more, your trade is governed by all kinds of rules and restrictions that you find very irksome. This was the dilemma of the Europeans dealing with China in the late 1700s. The Chinese produced highly covetable silk, porcelain, and lacquerware. Particularly, they produced that increasingly popular beverage, tea. But because they didn’t import so much of what the foreigners were offering, the balance had to be made up in foreign silver. And if you don’t want to keep raiding your treasury for silver, what do you do? Simple – you focus on a product that will always be wanted. Opium. You can't sell it legally, of course. But there’ll always be a demand for narcotics, so there will always be ways and means – as we can still confirm. By the 1820s, so much opium was being funnelled into China that the balance of trade had shifted. Now the silver was flowing out.

The Chinese, understandably, became keenly aware of the need to stop both the leakage of their silver, and the slow poisoning of their people. Commissioner Lin’s very serious attempt to clamp down on the trade is the main theme of River of Smoke.

Unfortunately, this principled stand brought retribution, and presumably the next volume in Ghosh’s trilogy will cover the tragedy that was the 1839-42 Opium War, after which Britain bullied China into accepting the Treaty of Nanjing. This paved the way for more "unequal treaties" with more states. One of the effects was to permit the opium trade.

This experience of injustice and humiliation, of course, is still one of the threads that inform Chinese foreign policy today.

Ghosh depicts very cleverly the events that sparked the Opium War, never letting his narrative sink into a simple division between “good” and “bad” sides. Many Chinese, too, profited from the opium trade. Among the multinational company of merchants, there were those who realized the iniquity of the trade, and wanted it to stop, and there were those who had not so much chosen the trade as been corralled into it by a combination of bad circumstances. Nevertheless, as even Chris Patten admits, these are not stories that show the British in a good light.

As the merchants thunder about the “God-given” right to free trade – happily ignoring that this right is ruining vast quantities of lives, and this trade is one that would not be countenanced at home – and as they rail against the cruelty of the tyrannical Chinese empire, you can’t help recalling that liberalism has always had that worrying capacity to unite a genuine desire for freedom with large quantities of hypocrisy and much potential for material gain. Walter Russell Mead’s memorable exegesis of Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter puts it admirably. The pair have such a laudable desire to clean up all these messy beaches. Who could object to that? But at the end of the day, the particular beach they're sitting on is not cleaned up, and the duo has dined very well on a large quantity of the beach's occupants… “Fairly or not, the psalm-singing, pocket-picking emissaries of the Anglo-Saxon world are met with suspicion wherever they go. So many beaches unswept; so few oysters uneaten. It begins to look almost like a pattern.”

So what does this have to do with Southeast Asia? Well, this is a region that still has to cope with a China that remembers, and still has to handle a liberalism that is both kind and cruel.

And, of course, the opium trade impacted heavily on colonial Southeast Asia itself. As Carl Trocki explains, behind the worthy civic buildings in British Singapore was an economy that was oiled by opium. It seeped into the social structures and the political dynamics. And because silver was flowing out of China to pay for opium, and China was becoming poorer in relation to the West, more of its people were taking refuge overseas, many in Southeast Asia.

The globalization of commodity and people flows, as River of Smoke makes so clear, is not a new invention, and Southeast Asia has always played a role as source, conduit or destination for whatever is flowing.

Informative, thought-provoking, and a darn good read – hope we don’t have to wait too long for the next one.