Empire, Bureaucracy, and the Opium Trade in Southeast Asia (2024)

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Volume 127 Issue 3 September 2022
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Diana S.

Kim

.

Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia

.

Princeton, NJ

:

Princeton University Press

,

2020

. Pp.

336

. Cloth $39.95.

Andrew J Rotter

Colgate University

,

USA

Email: arotter@colgate.edu

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Oxford Academic

The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 1416–1418, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac225

Published:

29 November 2022

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At the heart of Diana S. Kim’s Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia lies a mystery: At a time when the Southeast Asian colonies of Great Britain and France generated more than half their tax income from sales of opium, why did both governments move first toward control, then prohibition, of the drug? From an economic standpoint, the decisions make no sense. Given the undeniable racism of white colonial officials, there would seem to have been little impulse for them to worry overmuch about the health of their subjects. And yet the sale of opium was largely prohibited by the British in Burma in 1894 and Malaya in 1925, and by the French in Indochina in 1946. Why?

Historians who have studied the opium trade in Southeast Asia have tended to credit external pressures for what they claimed were grudging decisions for prohibition. Missionaries and social reformers from the metropoles and in the colonies objected to the human misery caused by the drug, and in good part because of this, opium production declined in India and China and international organizations erected a regime of control over the opium trade, leaving governments little choice but to yield, despite the financial benefits of their sales. This was progress. It was widely felt, and it was seemingly inevitable.

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