Opium’s Empire and Circulatory Networks in the Indian Ocean

An exploitative regime of imperialist expansion unleashed by the British on China and India, the 'empire of opium' refashioned socio-economic and political relations across large parts of the colonial world, resulting in the creation of new geographies of imperialism focused on the Indian subcontinent. By unearthing unexplored histories of communication and commodity exchange; through the intersecting networks of European commercial shipping and indigenous mercantile networks of nineteenth-century India; and in studying the exploitative labour regimes and extractive political economy of colonial rule in India, this paper will reflect on early stages of globalised capital and the local roots of its networks within South Asia. This paper will reconceptualise the meaning of space and frontiers through the journey of a commodity within an imperial, but also a globalised context. Domestic opium routes emerging in India came to chart a global trajectory through the story of competitive opium cultivation, using Indian knowledge systems, by the Portuguese interests in Zanzibar and Mozambique. Similarly, port cities like Bombay became the destination for global transshipment of opium from Africa and the Middle East, and post and custom offices in Calcutta became the focus of overland networks of opium transmission across East Asia. Through these examples, this paper seeks to establish the primacy of inter-Asian interaction, which lay at the very heart of the process of reorienting political control away from the metropole and placing it in the colonial peripheries, in the many Asias dotting the Indian Ocean littoral from Mozambique to India to Yunnan.