> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 2 - Seeds *Camellia sinensis*, the tea bush, produces most of the world's tea. It has been traced as far back as 2,150 years, to the tomb of China's Jia Ding Emperor. Portugal was the first European nation to enter the Indian Ocean. Macao was leased to the Portuguese in 1557 by the Ming Dynasty. Portugal had already been drinking Chinese tea for a hundred years when Catherine of Braganza, who was Portuguese, married King Charles II of England. Her dowry included the six islands of Bombay, and a casket of tea. By the early 18th-century, Chinese tea had become an important commodity for British trade. Chinese tea was the British East India Company's main source of revenue, financing the conquest of North America and India throughout the 18th-century. It was so important to Britain that the Company was required to keep a year's supply in stock. Britain regularly raised tea duties to pay for war. The duty ranged from 75 percent to 125 per cent of its market value. By comparison, China only charged 10 percent as an export duty. In 1857, the value of imports from China into the United Kingdom was: - 1.8 times British North America - twice Australia - 2.2 times British West Indies - 6.4 times British South AFrica - 72.2 times New Zealand Through the 18th and 19th centuries, tea duties accounted for 10 percent of Britain's revenues. This was as much as all land, property and income taxes combined. It could pay for the salaries of all government servants, all public works and buildings, all expenses related to law, justice and foreign establishments - combined. Britain had nothing much to sell to China, as China was not interested in its manufactured goods. Instead, it traded silver bullion, recently unlocked by the European conquest of the Americas, and mined in vast numbers by enslaved indigenous and African workers. However, by the mid-18th century, the supply was dwindling. Since the late 1700s, Britain had been trying to grow tea in India. But China had strict controls over taking seeds or seedlings out of the country, and foreigners were not free to roam around grabbing plants, as they had done elsewhere. The solution it found was to find a more mysterious and powerful plant to balance the trade with China. India was already exporting a lot of cotton to China. It was also doing a brisk trade in a variety of poppy, *Papaver somniferum*. --- Tea only gained popularity in India in the 1940s, as a result of a sophisticated marketing campaign, involving some of the foremost artists and cultural leaders of the time, such as Satyajit Ray, and Annada Munshi, a pioneer of commercial design in India. Tibet started consuming tea in the seventh century. From there, it spread to Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Ladakh and Kashmir. Camellia sinensis was native to north-eastern India, but the British only discovered that in the 1820s. India's first tea plantations were established in Assam a decade later. The British did not trust Indian labour and know-how, and brought seeds over from China after the first Opium War (1839-42) made this possible. They also brought over Chinese labourers. The British achieved enormous productivity by enforcing a racialized system of production in which white plantation owners got tax concessions, and non-white indentured labourers worked under coercive conditions. (The same system was used in Ceylon, Kenya and Malaya.) > The same colonial state that waged war on China in the name of capitalism and Free Trade had no compunctions about enforcing a system of unfree labour within its own borders. The British also promoted the idea that their tea was modern and pure, whereas Chinese tea was dirty and unhygienic. Thanks to this commerical warfare, India eclipsed Chinese tea production by the 20th century. > In effect, a pillar of the Chinese export economy was demolished through a process of technological theft initiated by the British Empire. This structural, long-term conflict was mediated by non-human entities - tea and opium. It mirrored the devastation which Europeans had unleashed on the Americas and Australia, through diseases, pathogens, terraforming, and introduction of non-native fauna and flora. The British even convinced themselves that they were less violent than the Spanish because they relied on structural rather than physical aggression. It helped that Europeans had come to think of "Nature" as separate from human, and thus they had no responsbility over the spread of diseases, which was a "natural" process. > Destruction through inaction thus became one of the essential features of biopolitical conflict. ### Chapter 3 - An Actor in Its Own Right The opium poppy, *Papaver somniferum* is believed to have originated in central or eastern Europe, possibly the Balkans, or around the Black Sea. There are no wild varieties of opium; they are all cultivars which co-evolved with human beings. Opium has been found in a 6,000 year old site in Switzerland, and an Egyptian tomb that dates back to 2,000 BCE. It has been used mostly for its medicinal purposes, and is an indispensable ingredient in modern medicine. It was only a few hundred years ago that it began to be appreciated for its psychoactive properties. Every culture has valued altered states of consciousness, developing techniques to achieve this. "Children at play will whirl themselves into a vertiginous stupor" (David Courtwright, attributing this insight to Andrew Weil.) "Grassroots psychoactives" – wine, toddy, cannabis, coca, betel nut, kava, peyote, tobacco, pituri, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, mescalin – are used primarily for their psychoactive properties, are widespread, and don't need much processing to be consumed. Opium was expensive to produce, and was an elitist substance. The term "hipster" comes from the Chinese opium smokers of the 1800s, who smoked opium while reclining on one hip. Hipster culture was inspired by heroin-addicted jazz greats like Charlier Parker and John Coltrane. (Beth Macy, Dopesick) ### Chapter 4 - Frenemies The Portuguese were the first to include opium as diplomatic gifts to local rulers around the Indian Ocean. When the Dutch took over from the Portuguese as the dominant power, they continued to use opium to secure monopolies in commodities such as nutmeg, mace, cloves and pepper. They discovered that the demand for opium could grow unstoppably once supplies became easily available. The Dutch started procuring large amounts of opium in India in 1640, and within 40 years created a 17-fold increase in the market in Java and Madura. They were the major buyers of opium in East India, and would sell it in the East Indies (Malay and Indonesian archipelagos), where the Dutch East India Company, or VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), had a complete monopoly. The Chinese of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) had acquired the habit of smoking opium around 1617. Chinese merchants began spreading this custom to Taiwan and the ports of Fujian province. They would dip tobacco in liquid opium, which produced a tiny amount of morphia (0.2 per cent by weight). The Qing state passed a ban on it as early as 1729, when total annual importation was only 200 chests. The ban penalized dealers, but not smokers. Over the next decades, a technique was developed to refine crude opium into chandu, or "smoking opium", which did not need to be mixed with tobacco, and delivered a more powerful high, between 9 and 10 per cent morphia. Several Southeast Asian rulers tried to restrict the inflow of opium, and the VOC fought many small "opium wars". > In other words, the Dutch created a template in the seventeenth century that ensured, as Hans Derks notes, that 'almost all Asiatic wars' would henceforth have 'a strong narco-character through to the present, including the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. The VOC's monopoly on opium generated vast wealth. In 1709, one Governor General went back to Holland with 10 million guilders, a "Bill Gates" fortune at present value. In 1745, senior officials of the VOC formed the Amphioen (or Opium) Society, which negotiated special privileges in buying and disposing of opium. WIlliam IV, Prince of Orange, was given shares, from which he and his progeny reaped enormous profits. # Quotes