Smoke and Ashes Quotes

“Modern Bombay, in a sense, has its genesis in the poppy fields of Bihar.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey through Opium's Hidden Histories

“The term “hipster”, in fact, drew from the Chinese opium smoker of the 1800s, who’d spent much of his time smoking while reclining on one hip. The hipster counter-culture took inspiration from heroin-addicted jazz greats like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“Addiction is an illness of exposure. By and large those who have access to junk become addicts.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“the machine gun shall you be judged.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“And now you are teaching our young men your secret. You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Do you know that we have a genius for mechanics? Do you not know that there are in this country four hundred millions of the most practical and industrious people in the world? Do you think it will take us long to learn? And what will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white and fire them as straight? You have appealed to the machine gun and by”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“Do you know that we tried an experiment that is unique in the history of the world? We sought to rule this great country not by force, but by wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then why does the white man despise the yellow? Shall I tell you? Because he has invented the machine gun. That is your superiority. We are a defenseless horde and you can blow us into eternity. You have shattered the dream of our philosophers that the world could be governed by the power of law and order.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“Amongst the best known of these plants are peaches, peonies, chrysanthemums, camellias, gardenias, azaleas, forsythias, wisteria, and crabapples, to mention but a few. And the development of the modern repeat-flowering roses would not have occurred had the so-called monthly roses not been brought to Europe from Chinese gardens.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“literally willing to take ‘anything goes’ to the point of creating a catastrophe for all of humanity, just as opium traders were once willing to let millions of people fall into addiction on the pretext that there existed a law of the market that dictated it.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“It is almost as if the elders of the plant kingdom, having concluded that Homo sapiens was too dangerous an animal to be allowed to survive, had given humankind a gift that they knew would be used by the most ruthless and powerful of the species to build economic systems that would slowly, inexorably, bring about the end of their civilizations.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“John Forbes’s path to success was very much like that of his uncle John Cushing’s. He too grew up in straitened circumstances but in a family that had important commercial and educational connections: one of his uncles was Thomas Handasyd Perkins, the Boston merchant, and another was the head of Phillips Exeter Academy.67 On arriving in Guangzhou in 1830, as a boy of seventeen, he was shoehorned into Russell & Co. by his family. Soon, he and his brother were also on quasi-familial terms with Wu Bingjian and his clan. Years later, John Forbes would write:”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“One of Shiva Lal’s patrons was the Opium Agent in charge of the Patna Factory, Robert Lyell: it was through this connection that Shiva Lal was invited into the Opium Factory’s closely guarded precincts to paint the workers. There are nineteen such paintings and they are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“What dawned on me then was that certain objects are themselves the material, silent equivalent of words spoken by invisible, spectral forces and agencies that often form our lives without our being aware of it. In a strange reversal, the inanimate articles around me suddenly became my teachers, showing me that my physical existence spoke of a past that was completely different from the histories I had read about in books and documents.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“The term “hipster”, in fact, drew from the Chinese opium smoker of the 1800s, who’d spent much of his time smoking while reclining on one hip.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke And Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“The brute fact is that it was a flower that defeated the mightiest military power in human history: the opium poppy may be humble in appearance, but it is one of the most powerful Beings that humans have encountered in their time on earth. To be sure, tea, sugarcane, tobacco, rubber, cotton, Yersinia pestis, and many other plants and pathogens have played major roles in human history, some of them over several centuries. But today they are all much diminished in their influence, while the opium poppy is mightier than ever.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“East India Company could not formally or explicitly acknowledge that its opium was intended for the Chinese market: doing so would have meant the loss of its trading rights and the end of its immensely lucrative tea business. So, in order to preserve its commercial privileges, the Company created an ingenious subterfuge. Opium from the Ghazipur and Patna factories was loaded on to heavily guarded fleets and sent to Calcutta, where it was auctioned to ‘private traders’.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“Despite the enormous imbalance between exports and imports, the trade was still profitable because Chinese goods bought with silver could be sold in Europe for two or three times what they had cost. Transfers of bullion on that scale were possible only because the world’s supply of precious metals had been hugely increased by the mines of the Americas.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“11 In short, through much of the Industrial Revolution, the finances of the British government were heavily dependent on tea, the vast bulk of which came from China. The problem was that Britain had nothing much to sell to China in return; the Chinese had little interest in, and no need for, most Western goods.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“The opium trade was thus an essential element of an emerging capitalist system that was then spreading rapidly across the globe. Yet, far from being a free market, this system was firmly founded on colonialism and race; in that sense it was an instance of what Cedric J. Robinson called ‘racial capitalism’.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“It so happened that Osborne had a colleague called Richard W. Blair who also brought his family to live in a small town in Bihar, where he was posted as Sub-Deputy Opium Agent. It was there, in Motihari, near the Nepal border, that Eric Blair, who later took the name George Orwell, was born in 1903. Orwell was still an infant when his mother, prompted by concerns about her children’s education, left for England with him and his sisters. But a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent’s salary was hardly adequate for a good school, and even though the boy did succeed in gaining entry into a ‘snobbish and expensive’ preparatory school, he was haunted throughout his life by memories of his straitened childhood.20 Later, as an officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, Orwell probably smoked opium himself. ‘What are the pleasures of opium?’ he once wrote. ‘Like other pleasures, they are, unfortunately, indescribable.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“the first is the Austrian historian Rolf Bauer, whose book The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India was published in 2019. The second is Matthew Wormer, an American, whose dissertation, titled ‘Opium, Economic Thought, and the Making of Britain’s Free Trade Empire, 1773–1839’, earned him a PhD in history from Stanford in 2022.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“Hence the history of the eighteenth century was seen as a story of Man’s natural rights, and of liberation and emancipation: the concurrent histories of genocide and slavery that were unfolding in the same period were either obscured or presented as unfortunate deviations from this narrative. Instead, the preferred story of the nineteenth century was one that foregrounded the Industrial Revolution, which was said to have been brought about by the scientific discoveries and technological innovations of lone geniuses. That many of the key innovations came from an armaments industry that had been supercharged by British colonial wars, and that much of the capital for industrialization was extracted by means of slave labour, and the drug trade, were relegated to irrelevance, simply because they did not fit the narrative of Progress.65”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“many Westerners, especially the elites of the Anglosphere, came to be convinced that trade and commerce were also governed by laws that were impervious to human intervention, so that all efforts to curtail the free circulation of goods, opium included, were doomed to failure. Many colonial officials and merchants seem to have genuinely believed that Free Trade was a kind of natural, quasi-divine law, and that it was futile, even perverse, for any state to attempt to regulate the flow of opium—even though they knew perfectly well that it was armed force, rather than the abstract laws of Free Trade, that ensured the ever-expanding circulation of opium in Asia.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“Europeans did not, by any means, invent the opium trade. Rather, as with the traffic in human beings on the Atlantic Coast, they took certain pre-existing, small-scale practices and transformed them while also expanding them by orders of magnitude.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“In sum, it was the Dutch who led the way in enmeshing opium with colonialism, and in creating the first imperial narco-state, heavily dependent on drug revenues”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“The term “hipster”, in fact, drew from the Chinese opium smoker of the 1800s, who’d spent much of his time smoking while reclining on one hip. The hipster counter-culture took inspiration from heroin-addicted jazz greats like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.’22”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

“In his 1901 tract, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, Naoroji writes: What a spectacle [the opium trade] is to the world! In England no Statesman dares to propose that opium may be allowed to be sold in public houses at the corners of every street, in the same way as beer or spirits. On the contrary, Parliament, as representing the whole nation, distinctly enacts that ‘opium and all preparations of opium or of “poppies,” as “poison,” be sold by certified chemists only, and every box, bottle, vessel, wrapper, or cover in which such poison is contained, be distinctly labelled with the name of the article and the word “poison,” and with the name and address of the seller of the poison.’ And yet, at the other end of the world, this Christian, highly civilised, and humane England forces a ‘heathen’ and ‘barbarous’ Power to take this ‘poison,’ and tempts a vast human race to use it, and to degenerate and demoralise themselves with this ‘poison’! … It is wonderful how England reconciles this to her conscience. This opium trade is a sin on England’s head, and a curse on India for her share in being the instrument.38”
― Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey through Opium's Hidden Histories