mpire is a critical context for an understanding of the rise of addiction,
because many of substances considered illicit in the imperial center were indigenous
to the periphery. For example, opium came from Turkey and India; cocaine from
South America. Even more legitimate substances considered habitual to English
daily life, such as tea, sugar, and tobacco became available through imperial
trade with the Far East and the West Indies. In particular, the story of opium
and the British Empire is one of fierce commercial imperialism. After the conquest
of Bengal, the East India Company took over a lucrative native trade in which
raw opium was grown in India and exported to China, in spite of Chinese prohibitions.
The British persisted in the covert trade, in defiance of the Emperor's pleas
to Queen Victoria, the public execution of opium traffickers, and the public
destruction of thousands of chests of opium worth about two million pounds sterling.
British intransigence precipitated the first Opium War in 1839, which ended
with Chinese surrender and the Treaty of Nankin in 1842. Through this treaty,
the British agreed to discourage opium smuggling, but they also received recompense
for destroyed opium, new access to ports, and the island of Hong Kong, on which
they built an opium depot. The British continued trading opium, and a second
war began in 1857 and concluded in 1860 with another Chinese defeat and the
Treaty of Tien-Tsin, which legalized the importation of Indian-grown opium into
China.
Given its Oriental origins, opium was exotic in Britain. Even before the opium trade became an important issue, and before the medical establishment took notice of opium, Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) construed opium as the medium of an exhilarating and terrifying contact with the Orient. Much later, British agitation against the trade began to figure opium as a dangerous substance. A group that advocated against the trade in opium and the wars to protect it, the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (SSOT), tried to convince the British public that the trade was wrong because opium was a poison, and the Chinese custom of smoking it was unhealthy. Along with the rising medical establishment, the SSOT helped convince Britons that opium required regulation to prevent the formation of habits. The SSOT was motivated by a paternalistic concern for the health of the Chinese people. But as opium became demonized in the British imaginary, images of "opium dens" in the Chinese immigrant neighborhoods of London such as Limehouse began to appear in the mainstream media. In these dangerous spaces, white British subjects — especially women — came under the contaminating influence of a pernicious foreign custom, opium smoking. Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards have shown that what were perceived to be "dens" were really just the homes of Chinese immigrants, whose numbers were never very high in nineteenth-century London. Yet the exotic spectacle of intoxication pervaded texts such as Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1871) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In the early twentieth century, the malign specter of the Chinese opium-smuggling gangster, hooking young English girls, would be disseminated through Sax Rohmer's sensational stories such as The Yellow Claw (1917) and other stories of slumming, like Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights (1916).
The imperial context was important to the development of the idea of addiction because it required distinctions between custom, habit, and disease. Britons could compare opium-smoking as an Eastern custom to their own custom of drinking alcohol. But if opium-smoking was endemic or natural to the Chinese, it was a harmful habit that could develop into a disease for the British, thus accentuating its unnaturalness in British bodies. Racial theories of difference suggested that Chinese, Indian, or Malay natures were predisposed to "low" habits; by contrast, if British subjects caught this disease, perhaps they could be cured.
Ireland provides another interesting perspective on addiction and empire. Until the 1830s, the Irish temperance movement was largely controlled by the Ulster gentry, but the charismatic Catholic Father Mathew changed all that by considerably broadening the appeal of temperance. By instituting an oath and dispensing temperance medals, Father Mathew started a sensation that drew millions of Irish to his meetings. He tried to maintain the non-partisan nature of his movement, emphasizing that anyone could take the pledge to improve his or her own life, and that once this was achieved, Ireland would be regenerated too. Daniel O'Connell realized that mass movement was possible after observing the response to Father Mathew, and he quickly moved to attach Repeal to temperance. Young Ireland and Thomas Davis followed, linking individual and national sobriety to national liberation. A familiar nationalist slogan was "Ireland Sober, Ireland Free." These movements were curtailed by the famine, and temperance never again gained the same appeal.
Why did the Irish link nationalism to temperance? For a long time British racism toward the Irish had been grounded in a view of them as perpetually drunk, and therefore irrational and unable to manage their own affairs. Sobriety would prove to the British that the Irish could rule themselves. In the twisted logic of British racism, it was Irish poverty and starvation that paradoxically made the Irish seem to be drunk all the time, because they could not master the relationship between labor, cultivation, and nutrition. A body that habitually oscillates between two states, of luxurious indulgence and dire need, can come to seem incorporeal itself; stubbornly withholding evidence of its participation in a healthy, balanced economy of production and consumption. The colonial Irish body — and perhaps even colonial bodies in general — assume a paradoxical incorporeality in the British imaginary. Against these misconceptions the Irish articulated a vision of their own physical and national self-governance.
Created 7 September 2002
Last modified 9 December 2022