{"id":1388,"date":"2019-04-08T21:10:44","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T21:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=1388"},"modified":"2019-04-08T21:10:55","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T21:10:55","slug":"the-opium-trade-is-so-good-at-networking-it-should-get-a-linkedin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2019\/04\/08\/the-opium-trade-is-so-good-at-networking-it-should-get-a-linkedin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Opium Trade Is So Good At Networking It Should Get A Linkedin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The 19<sup>th<\/sup> century Opium Trade\nencompasses a vast geographic area and variety of transnational actors \u2013 so much\nso that it is difficult to pin down a specific network or group that can encapsulate\nthe Opium Trade\u2019s transnational influence. Initially I thought the Opium Trade\nwas largely exclusive to a closed network between Britain, India (as a British\ncolonial outpost) and China. I quickly found that this was not the case. The\nDutch and Portuguese had been the first colonial powers to establish their own sources\nof opium production in India and trade networks in China between the 17<sup>th<\/sup>\nand 19<sup>th<\/sup> centuries. The British were ostensibly late to the party\nwhen they began using opium as a counter-balance for the tea and porcelain\ntrade in the 1790s. In fact, it took a significant effort by the British\nimperial government in India to push the Portuguese out of the opium business and\nmonopolise the trade for themselves. My more recent research has revealed that merchant\ncompanies based in the United States began embedding themselves in the buying\nand selling of opium shortly after it gained independence from Britain in the\nearly 19<sup>th<\/sup> century. &nbsp;Philadelphia,\nBaltimore and Boston based merchant companies would send their ships across the\nglobe in order to capitalise on the profitable albeit illegal smuggling of\nopium to Canton. The first stop for American ships would be in what is now Southern\nTurkey, where opium was harvested and sold in bulk at commercial centres. They\nwould then push on to Canton where they would sell to opium British or Chinese\nsmugglers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If I focus purely on the networks\nof American, Indian and British merchants instigating the trade, I would risk\ndiminishing the Chinese perspective of the trade, which is massively important\nconsidering opium inundated all subsets of their society and played a major\nrole in the eventual subjugation of China by foreign powers. That being said, modern\nChinese perspectives of the trade tend to be overtly nationalistic and\ncharacterise the trade as an infringement on their national sovereignty. It\nwould also be an oversight to include American involvement in the trade without\ndiscussing the source of their opium in the Ottoman Empire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After some brainstorming I\u2019ve begun\nto speculate that in order to narrow my approach to the Opium Trade, I could\nfocus on a single merchant firm, like Perkins and Company or Jardine Matheson.\nThe empirical data on such firms are often accessible, and in Jardine Matheson\u2019s\ncase the basis of ground-breaking studies of the trade like H.B. Morse\u2019s <em>Chronicles<\/em>. These merchant firms were\ntransnational networks of their own. They employed middlemen of Bengali,\nChinese, Turkish and South Asian descent but were managed by British businessmen.\nIn the long run, I expect the breadth of networks to study and focus on to be\nbeneficial as there is a seemingly limitless array of sources to pour over.\nThere is still much work to be done! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 19th century Opium Trade encompasses a vast geographic area and variety of transnational actors \u2013 so much so that it is difficult to pin down a specific network or group that can encapsulate the Opium Trade\u2019s transnational influence. Initially<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-mo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1389,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions\/1389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}