Early Modern East Asia

War, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange

Kenneth M. Swope, Tonio Andrade, Kenneth M. Swope, Tonio Andrade

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315282794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a great deal of new primary research on a wide range of aspects of early modern East Asia. Focusing primarily on maritime connections, the book explores the importance of international trade networks, the implications of technological dissemination, and the often unforeseen consequences of missionary efforts. It demonstrates the benefi ts of a global history approach, outlining the complex interactions between Western traders and Asian states and entrepreneurs. Overall, the book presents much interesting new material on this complicated and understudied period.

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1Qing opium dependency and Republican opium autonomy

David A. Bello

The Sino-British global drug traffic was a development of what John E. Wills Jr. has called “the interactive emergence” of European domination of “the modern world system” in maritime Asia. This interaction, as shaped by regional “patterns of production, trade, and governance,” subsequently “emerged in highly contingent and specific ways from … mutual adaptations” between European and Asian actors. The invention of opium paste is one such contingent emergence because it was the largely fortuitous result of a semi-conscious collaborative transnational enterprise between Chinese smokers of Qing China and its Southeast Asian diaspora, the poppy cultivators of British India and the free-trading smugglers of Great Britain and their monopolist opponents. The outcome of this collaboration proved very difficult for any state to fully control, at least in part because opium constituted an unprecedented concentration of the essence of state power itself, in an all too easily reproducible and exploitable form. The emergence of what is arguably the world’s first modern drug problem challenged state centralization through its potential for converting mass drug consumption into the economic basis for regionalized sovereignty. Through the process of mutual adaptation, the physical drug dependency of individuals could abet regional economic, and ultimately political, autonomy.

In China, such autonomy came about through the interplay of complex factors, which include those that can be categorized quite broadly as “natural” and concern the mutually conditioning effects of ecology, human physiology and poppies. Anthropogenic factors can be subdivided into domestic administrative structures, which concern indirect rule and revenue problems as well as related domestic obstacles to prohibition and monopolization. The other subdivision is foreign relations, which concerns Qing diplomatic and economic interactions with British India as well as the Inner Asian Khanate of Kokand. The Raj and the Khanate were effectively sponsors of the drug traffic on the Qing empire’s southeastern and northwestern frontiers, respectively. These natural and anthropogenic factors combined to create a Qing drug infrastructure in three basic dimensions, which were to some extent, ethnically distinct. The production dimension was grounded in borderland domestic poppy cultivation by mainly minority growers in northwestern and southwestern China. The consumption dimension was centered in urban regions of largely Han, or ethnic Chinese, residence in China proper. The distribution dimension, encompassing both foreign and domestic subsections, connected producers and consumers across the empire and beyond, mainly via South Asia, Inner Asia and maritime Europe.

Full-blown opium-enabled political autonomy emerged only during the first half of the twentieth century, most notably during China’s warlord period which, strictly speaking, lasted from 1916–26. Nevertheless, China, despite the official establishment of the Republic in 1911–12 and its substantial consolidation after 1926, was never a fully unified nation-state during the eponymous Republican period up to 1949. Republican China saw the emergence of many warlord states that drew critical portions of their revenues from opium.¹ The foundation of this opium autonomy had been laid during the preceding Qing Dynasty (1644–1912).

While the Qing origins of Republican opium dynamics are generally recognized, most studies tend to focus on one regime or the other. Opium control problems within China and within British India, as opposed to the drug traffic between them, are likewise almost always treated separately. Even work that does try to encompass both usually does not cover Qing events in detail before the late nineteenth century and beyond the southeast coast.² Finally, little current material on poppy ecology and opium effects on human physiology is integrated into any of the historical literature. This chapter addresses these critical gaps through the additional examination of the longer Qing record prior to the 1830s in a more global context. It will also outline the significance of ecological and physiological, as well as anthropogenic, factors characteristic of the Qing drug dependency that produced Republican opium autonomy. I emphasize the appearance of opium paste smoking in the context of regional dynastic administration to take the empire’s western borderlands into greater consideration. Where possible, I also briefly consider the comparative implications of opium control for China and for British India, the two imperial states that formed the axis of what I consider the first modern global drug traffic.

Some global considerations

The Qing predecessor, the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), was the first Chinese society to encounter early modern globalization within the context of maritime Asia’s interactive emergence. The Ming experienced the early stage of globalization primarily through “exchanges of trade goods, food plants, diseases, people, and ideas” that were situated within “a very special set of environments dominated by a very distinctive variant of Chinese culture, economy, and politics: that of the maritime Han Chinese.”³

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maritime East and Southeast Asia were subject to considerable economic and political instability and conflict as a succession of European rivals, first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, then the Dutch, aggressively shoved their way in among an already unruly, heterogeneous indigenous populace. Illicit practices, which could encompass whole rafts of commodity traffics and islands full of unauthorized settlement, were endemic, if not ubiquitous. Melaka, Macao, Manila, the Penghu Islands, the Zhoushan Archipelago and Taiwan all became, at one time or another, shady sites of commercial and military clashes between a bewildering array of contenders.⁴ By the nineteenth century, the regional contest among the European maritime powers had been settled in favor of Great Britain, but maritime Asia did not exactly settle down. The global drug traffic was one contemporary result of “the changes that ended around 1800 with Europe dominating all the world’s seaways.” This conclusion, however, did not end conflict with China, but actually exacerbated it. Moreover, European maritime power could not have prevailed without the active participation of non-Europeans. Indeed, Indian cultivators and distributors, along with their Chinese counterparts continued to participate in support of a British early modern seaborne drug trade between the two Asian countries well beyond 1800.⁵

Yet, there was resistance as well, arising in part from different early modern experiences with opium in India and China. From the perspective of India’s rulers, the Qing state had a rather belated, schizophrenic socio-political relationship with poppy (Papaver somniferum) cultivation for opium. A legacy of the Mughals, the drug monopoly played a critical role as a legitimate source of revenue for virtually the whole period of British rule in India. During the nineteenth century, it has been estimated that, at its peak, the opium monopoly generated 16 percent of total state revenues.⁶ Such an official relationship did not initially exist in China, despite its society’s familiarity with various poppy products, including a comparatively crude form of edible opium, since the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE).

In Indian terms, the Chinese state was indifferent to the economic potential of poppy. China’s first formal opium prohibition did not even emerge until 1729, and was not strongly enforced until the nineteenth century.⁷ Heavy public censure continued even during the qualified Qing legalization of the drug between 1858 and 1906, which, among other things, prevented the full legalization of domestic poppy cultivation until the 1880s. Equally intense private consumption and burgeoning cultivation, which persisted during corresponding periods of dynastic prohibition, effectively existed side by side from the late eighteenth century on. Genuine intensification of both opium consumption and prohibition during the Qing began only after the transformation of the drug from edible substance to smokeable paste, which occurred around 1800.⁸ The rough chronological coincidence of a polarization in attitudes to opium and a transformation in the drug’s mode of consumption suggests a link between the two at a formative stage in the Chinese historical context. Opium paste smoking, rather than generalized opium consumption, substantially and characteristically conditioned the responses of both Qing state and Qing society to opium.

The vast majority of historical studies of opium have focused on its purely socio-economic and socio-political effects, whose significance is certainly indisputable. However, as Flynn and Giráldez have convincingly argued,

trade and ecological activities are components of a single global network. It is dangerous and misleading to analytically bifurcate this global network into separate economic and ecological components because in doing so one risks losing sight of the global unity of the general system.⁹

The introduction of New World crops into early modern China during the Ming, which radically expanded arable land into previously inaccessible highland areas to boost food supply and ultimately population, is a classic example of what I would call this econo(mic)-ecolo(gical) synergy.¹⁰ The prevailing assumption in the mainly socio-economic analyses of the opium traffic is that only human interaction matters. This anthropocentric perspective tends to “restrict conceptualization of globalization to the sphere of economics alone,” without recognizing that “global economic forces have evolved in a deep and intimate intermix with noneconomic global forces over the past five centuries.”¹¹

Poppy, however, is an Old World crop, indeed one of the oldest and most valuable. Opium’s commodification, preceded by tea, actually displaced the two previous silver cycles that Flynn and Giráldez see as the main stuff of “global economic unity” from the sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries. The onset of what they call “the tea and opium cycle” produced “a sea change in foreign commerce in the middle of the eighteenth century in Asia” when “silver-based trade at the global level was in trouble.” In this process Old World crops replaced New World minerals as the most important commodity manifestations of globalization. In the geographic terms that Wills has stressed, there was likewise a shift from the Pacific to the Indian oceans. This does not mean that silver was no longer relevant to the global economy by the second half of the eighteenth century, but that its role became “complementary in terms of profitability” to that of tea and opium.¹² By this time Old World and New World commodities had become cyclically integrated. New World products were unquestionably profound agents of global transformations, but, to slightly reorient Wills’ core argument, they cannot be privileged through “an analytic separation” of New World “intrusion” and Old World “response.”

Whatever change in globalization trends produced by these crops and minerals was not purely “economic,” but related to physiological and ecological conditions to which humans could adapt, but not fully control or understand. Globalization, as manifested in historical formations like the Sino-British opium traffic, cannot be defined in purely economic terms as “a free market,” etc. These narrow parameters rigorously exclude the extra-economic conditions for the emergence of globalized market relations. In more specific terms of the traffic, they cannot alone explain why state-building and state-destabilizing levels of mass consumption of opium arose, but mainly how they did so in largely quantitative terms.¹³

Some environmental considerations

The Sino-British opium traffic was a highly contingent and specific maritime “interactive emergence,” born not only of “mutual adaptations” between Europeans and Asians, but between people and cultivars in an econo-ecolo synergy of globalization. It is therefore necessary to understand some of the basic physiological effects of opium, along with the ecological factors that produce them as a part of poppy botany. This perspective does not just maintain the global unity of the general human system, but redefines that system to appropriately expand its confines toward a genuinely world scale in environmental (i.e. interpenetrating cultural and ecological) terms.

Smokeable opium,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Jack Wills and his work and influence
• 1 Qing opium dependency and Republican opium autonomy
• 2 Rivers of blood & roads of bones: Sichuan in the Ming-Qing Transition
• 3 Dueling wills: Dutch administration and Formosan power, 1624–68
• 4 Sultan Hasanuddin’s rationale for re-expansion: Avenging Tiworo’s defeat in the seascape of the spice wars
• 5 Maritime China in global military history: Some reflections on the Chase model
• 6 The military implication of Zhu Wan’s coastal campaigns in southeastern China: Focusing on the matchlock gun (1548–66)
• 7 The seventeenth-century Guangdong pirates and their transnational impact
• 8 A ship full of Chinese passengers: Princess Amelia’s voyage from London to China in 1816–17
• 9 Hierarchy and anarchy in early modern East Asia: The tribute system as an international system
• 10 Why is China so big? And other big questions: An interview with John E. Wills, Jr., Amsterdam, 2005
• 2016 postscript to the Itinerario interview
• List of publications by John E. Wills, Jr.
• Index