Amitav Ghosh, 'Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories'

One of the observations Amitav Ghosh makes inSmoke and Ashes, an eighteen-chapter social history of opium, is that contemporary studies and news articles about the ongoing opioid crisis in the US hardly ever refer to coerced opium use in eighteenth or nineteenth century China; nor do they typically mention the extensive global trade networks that formed a cornerstone of colonial British (and later American) power and wealth.Ghosh, author of many non-fiction and fiction works including the Ibis Trilogy, which depicts the years preceding the First Opium War, here succeeds in writing a historical work with the accessibility of fiction.Smoke and Ashes is often personal in its narrative, sharing family anecdotes as well as Ghosh's experiences researching and writing the Ibis Trilogy.It is also episodic; rather than a single chronological arc, the book is composed of short chapters, each with a thematic focus with clearly-rendered characters and events that interweave an expansive and engaging history that can be enjoyed equally in long stretches or in short bursts.Ghosh's observation of the strange silence surrounding China in contemporary writing on opioids comes towards the close of the text but is illustrative of its first central claim: that, at the expense of China, Great Britain's imperial actions included both the exaggeration (and