The British East India Company’s tea trade with China bore a moral stain of another kind. Since the company had to pay for tea in sterling, and China had little interest in English goods, England began running a ruinous trade deficit with China. The East India Company came up with two clever strategies to improve its balance-of-payments position: It turned to India, a country it controlled that had no history of large-scale tea production, and transformed it into a leading producer of tea—and opium. The tea was exported to England and the opium, over the strenuous objections of the Chinese
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