British traders was not, as claimed by contemporary historians in the People’s Republic, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese empire; it was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports (clocks, watches, furs). ‘Opium is like gold’, wrote James Matheson’s first partner, Robert Taylor, in 1818. ‘I can sell it any time.’17 Even that was untrue: the Qing state’s erratic, ongoing campaign against the drug through the early decades of the nineteenth century, together with opportunistic over-production in India, made profit margins wildly
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