Opium Regimes

Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.

Papers presented at a conference on the history of opium in East Asia. Includes: Opium for China: The British Connection; Opium in Late-Edo to Meiji Eyes; Drugs, Taxes, & Chinese Capitalism in SE Asia; The Hong Kong Opium Revenue, 1845-1885; Drug Oper. by Resident Japanese in Tianjin; Opium/Leisure/Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption; The National Anti-Opium Assoc. & the Guomindang State, 1924-1937; Opium Control vs. Opium Suppression; The Responses of Opium Growers to Eradication Campaigns & the Poppy Tax, 1907-1949; Opium & Collaboration in Central China, 1938-1940; Japan vs. the Wang Jingwei Regime; Resistance to Opium as a Social Evil in Wartime China; & The Anti-drug Crusade in the People's Rep., 1949-1951; etc.

Publisher Description

Covering a period of about four centuries, this book demonstrates the economic and political components of the opium problem. As a mass product, opium was introduced in India and Indonesia by the Dutch in the 17th century. China suffered the most, but was also the first to get rid of the opium problem around 1950.

In 1920 the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs captured eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking. Steffen Rimner shows how local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to harness naming and shaming in international politics—a deterrent that continues today.

A Shared Turn : Opium and the Rise of Prohibition -- The Different Lives of Southeast Asia's Opium Monopolies -- "Morally Wrecked" in British Burma, 1870s-1890s -- Fiscal Dependency in British Malaya, 1890s-1920s -- Disastrous Abundance in French Indochina, 1920s-1940s -- Colonial Legacies.

Intoxicating Manchuria reveals how the powerful alcohol and opium industries in Northeast China were altered by warlord rule, Japanese occupation, political conflict, and a vigorous anti-intoxicant movement. Through the lens of the Chinese media’s depictions of alcohol and opium, Norman Smith examines how intoxicants and addiction were understood in this society, the role the Japanese occupation of Manchuria played in the portrayal of intoxicants, and the efforts made to reduce opium and alcohol consumption. This is the first English-language book-length study to focus on alcohol use in modern China and the first dealing with intoxicant restrictions in the region.

Examines China’s attempts to control the opium economy in the early twentieth century.