The 19th century Opium Trade encompasses a vast geographic area and variety of transnational actors – so much so that it is difficult to pin down a specific network or group that can encapsulate the Opium Trade’s transnational influence. Initially I thought the Opium Trade was largely exclusive to a closed network between Britain, India (as a British colonial outpost) and China. I quickly found that this was not the case. The Dutch and Portuguese had been the first colonial powers to establish their own sources of opium production in India and trade networks in China between the 17th and 19th centuries. The British were ostensibly late to the party when they began using opium as a counter-balance for the tea and porcelain trade in the 1790s. In fact, it took a significant effort by the British imperial government in India to push the Portuguese out of the opium business and monopolise the trade for themselves. My more recent research has revealed that merchant companies based in the United States began embedding themselves in the buying and selling of opium shortly after it gained independence from Britain in the early 19th century. Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston based merchant companies would send their ships across the globe in order to capitalise on the profitable albeit illegal smuggling of opium to Canton. The first stop for American ships would be in what is now Southern Turkey, where opium was harvested and sold in bulk at commercial centres. They would then push on to Canton where they would sell to opium British or Chinese smugglers.
If I focus purely on the networks of American, Indian and British merchants instigating the trade, I would risk diminishing the Chinese perspective of the trade, which is massively important considering opium inundated all subsets of their society and played a major role in the eventual subjugation of China by foreign powers. That being said, modern Chinese perspectives of the trade tend to be overtly nationalistic and characterise the trade as an infringement on their national sovereignty. It would also be an oversight to include American involvement in the trade without discussing the source of their opium in the Ottoman Empire.
After some brainstorming I’ve begun to speculate that in order to narrow my approach to the Opium Trade, I could focus on a single merchant firm, like Perkins and Company or Jardine Matheson. The empirical data on such firms are often accessible, and in Jardine Matheson’s case the basis of ground-breaking studies of the trade like H.B. Morse’s Chronicles. These merchant firms were transnational networks of their own. They employed middlemen of Bengali, Chinese, Turkish and South Asian descent but were managed by British businessmen. In the long run, I expect the breadth of networks to study and focus on to be beneficial as there is a seemingly limitless array of sources to pour over. There is still much work to be done!
I never thought I’d have to answer the question of ‘what’s so funny’ in relation to the opium trade, but after reading your title and promptly bursting out laughing in front of two of my housemates, that was more or less the situation with which I was confronted. A few mumbled excuses about LinkedIn networks and several responding eye-rolls later, and I was able to read on and find even more that was recognisable in your post.
The issues that you mention concerning the sheer expansiveness, interconnectedness, and multiplicity of these trading networks— around only a single commodity! —are all a part of the reason why, early on, I decided to concentrate my project on a single trading company… Though even now I’m struggling to refine and concentrate my research in ways which don’t place arbitrary constraints on spaces which might be of interest.
Working with so many different actors (or at many different sites, as in my own case) naturally adds a great deal of value to a study, but as Lucius suggested in a much earlier post, it is certainly debatable quite how much leeway 5,000 words affords us to follow up all of the available leads if we are to go into sufficient detail and structure our observations insightfully around them.
Still, you seem to have a good grasp of the advice offered by the primary sources tutorial, and by the Saunier article before that: that, very often, the best tactic is to follow the sources. I have personally found this to be a very grounding approach whenever I have become too baffled by secondary readings, so I have high hopes that this approach will provide you with a similar anchor for your project.
The opium trade, as you say, was incredibly interconnected. So interconnected that it built my house!
For context, my parents’ house was built in the mid 1840s by a ship captain who, officially, shipped tea and china plates from China to Salem, Massachusetts. However, it was a not-so-secret secret that the payment for the tea and china was not in silver but in opium! As you detail in the post and your project at large, he was part of that larger network of opium smuggling across the globe. This was not something uncommon for merchants in Northeastern Massachusetts at the time; most of the richest merchant families had either direct or indirect connections to the opium trade. The only ones who didn’t were those of particularly strong religious convictions because it actually took more effort in Salem in the early to mid 19th century to not be somewhat involved in the opium trade than to get involved in the first place.
I’m sorry I can’t comment in more detail as it’s been a few years since I went to one of a few museums in my region that cover the merchant trade and I haven’t studied the topic independently either. That being said, I would definitely look into Salem, Massachusetts if you’re interested in the America-China opium trade as Salem was one of the biggest ports in the United States in the late 18th and early 19th century, and Salem-based merchants were pioneers in the “tea and porcelain” trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem,_Massachusetts#Trade_with_the_Pacific_and_Africa