Pirating the Archive: Timothy Mo’s Opium History, Oceanic Orientalism, and Print Cargo at Sea

This article examines literary engagements with the nineteenth-century opium trade for what they tell us about Orientalism at sea. It focuses on the British-Chinese writer Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession (1986), a historical novel which imaginatively reconstructs the maritime worlds of the South China Sea during the First Opium War (1839–1842). Extending across 700 pages, the novel weaves together fictional and historical sources while commenting self-reflexively on the limits of the colonial archive upon which it relies. The plot meanwhile focuses on the establishment of a new press and the material difficulties involved in keeping it afloat. This article examines the novel’s representation of print culture at sea, focusing on the concept of piracy as a way of exploring problems of historical authenticity and authority. While An Insular Possession can be seen to ‘pirate’ the colonial archive and bring its authority into question, its representation of the way that literature travels from ship to shore as waterborne cargo draws attention to the powerful infrastructures of print, publishing, and copyright upon which this authority depends.