This story is remarkable, and revelatory, because at the heart of it lies a plant-the opium poppy. But the opium economy also had significant effects at the microlevel, influencing migration and settlement patterns, and touching upon millions of lives, including those of my own forefathers. Many of the world’s biggest corporations got their start in the colonial opium trade. It also traces the transformative impact that the opium trade had on India, China, Britain and the United States, with profound long-term consequences for the birth of the modern world, and of contemporary globalism. Smoke and Ashes is the story of how, under the aegis of the British Empire, India became the world’s largest producer of opium between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the different conditions under which opium was produced in various regions, with lasting effects for those areas. But in the course of my research, and much to my surprise, I stumbled upon a different trade in a precious commodity that was being carried in large quantities from India to China-opium! When I started writing the novels I thought they would be mainly about the transportation of indentured workers from India to Mauritius in the early nineteenth century. Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Smoke and Ashes reveals the pivotal role one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know-a world that is now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.Īmitav Ghosh says, “My new book, Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories, is based on the enormous quantities of material I accumulated while researching the trilogy of novels I wrote between 20.

In India the long-term consequences were even more profound.

Upon deeper exploration, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, several of America’s most powerful families and institutions, and contemporary globalism itself. Engineered by the British Empire, which exported opium from India to sell in China, the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s survival. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural. Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as on the world at large. Most surprising of all was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story.

When Amitav Ghosh began his research for the Ibis Trilogy some twenty years ago, he was startled to find how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by a precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium.

Amitav ghosh trilogy