2000/09/18 by Timothy Brook, Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi · 117 citations
Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Addiction #African history and culture studies #Ancient history #China #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Economic history #History #Japanese History and Culture #Law #Medicine #Neuroscience #Opium #Political science #Power (physics) #Psychiatry #Psychology #Rage (emotion) #Sociocultural evolution #State (computer science)
paper · doi:10.1525/california/9780520220096.001.0001
openalex publication_date 2000/09/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor for a now-vanished sociocultural world in and around China. This book integrates the research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. It presents an historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century, to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s. Together, these essays show that the complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.