Opium Season

In The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India, Rolf Bauer deals with the peasants who produced opium for the colonial state in nineteenth-century India. He shows how the peasants were forced to cultivate this unremunerative crop through a collaboration of the state and the Indian elite.

Burma (Myanmar) existed as a colony of the United Kingdom, ruled as a province of British India, for more than a century before it gained independence from the British in 1948. After a mere decade of independence, a coup by General Ne Win placed the country under direct military rule for nearly half a century. Th is period saw the proliferation of chronic civil wars, which, coupled with severe economic mismanagement, led Myanmar to become one of the most impoverished nations in the world. Decades of armed conflict have not only resulted in tremendous loss of life and suffering of the people, especially in ethnic minority areas on the country’s peripheries where most of the battles have taken place. They have also caused Myanmar to become one of the world’s leading opium producing nations.

Drug epidemics are clearly not just a peculiar feature of modern life; the opium trade in the nineteenth century tells us a great deal about Asian herion traffic today. In an age when we are increasingly aware of large scale drug use, this book takes a long look at the history of our relationship with mind-altering substances. Engagingly written, with lay readers as much as specialists in mind, this book will be fascinating reading for historians, social scientists, as well as those involved in Asian studies, or economic history.

Bitter, brownish and sticky, opium - the sap of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum - has been cultivated from the earliest of times.