Poppy in the era of prohibition: Smuggling and state complicity in Upper Burma, c. 1890–1940

This article looks at the opium economy and the opium regime in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Burma, focusing particularly on the Burma–China and Burma–Siam borderlands. It explores British responses to complaints from China, as well as Siam, regarding the smuggling of opium from Burma in the very decades — the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s — when the world was moving towards regulation and prohibition. It explains how and why the British Burma government failed to curb both the cultivation of poppy in Burma's uplands and the smuggling of opium to/from neighbouring China and Siam. The colonial government frequently sought to explain away why so little had been achieved and why opium continued to find its way across the border (e.g., from Kengtung state to Siam). Rather than taking these facts at face value, this article reveals the potent relationship between borderlands, smuggling, and state-making, while linking this finding to ideas about Zomia and establishing what was distinctive about the Burma–China–Siam borderland compared with others in the British Empire in Asia.