Commodities and aesthetics: Britain, India, China, and the opium trade

This chapter argues that over the Romantic period opium was transformed in significance from a commonly used medicinal substance to a subjectively and politically charged commodity closely associated with ideas of addiction and global commerce. The writers Coleridge and De Quincey, themselves dependent on opium, provided the crucial literary impetus for the transformation; however, their writings were embedded in a wider context of Sinophobic metropolitan culture driven by Britain’s sense of imperial rivalry with China. These processes, aided by the new media culture of periodicals and brought to a head in the First Opium War of 1839-42, resulted in the emergence of modern ideas of addiction with far-ranging implications, ushering in a powerful legacy of stereotypes and historiographical traditions that vary widely between western and formerly colonized regions. Colonial rule in India provided the opportunity to expand the cultivation of opium overseas while the habit-forming capacity of the drug could be capitalised to generate potentially limitless demand for the commodity. These developments spelt the growth of empire conveniently displaced in British territories overseas and accompanied by warfare and its rhetoric when confronted with perceived intransigence on the part of the Chinese. Thus, the place of opium within the interrelated global exchanges of crops such as tobacco, tea, and sugar can be vitally incorporated into the long nineteenth-century history of environmental degradation and climate change instigated by capitalism and empire. Literary writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey did not foresee these developments in their entirety; nevertheless, their imaginative experiences of the drug, informed by their anxious engagements with the east, have left a powerful literary legacy that have proved culturally formative to ideas of addiction embedded within our present condition of modernity.