VOC) in the East 189
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The “Violent Opium Company” (VOC) in the East 189 CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE L “VIO ENT OPIUM COMPANY” (VOC) IN THE EAST … a robber-state along the North Sea ... which build railways of stolen money and by way of payment dopes with opium, gospel and gin those who are robbed.. Multatuli (Max Havelaar, 1859) It seems as if a royal monopoly is used as a means to get an advantage for the state treasury from an abuse, which one is unable to resolve. J.C.Baud (1853).1 ‘The Dutch had used the drug in Java and elsewhere not simply as an article of commerce—trading it for pepper—but as a useful means for breaking the moral resistance of Indonesians, who opposed the introduc- tion of their semi-servile but immensely profitable plantation system.’ Jack Beeching2 A “Heart of Darkness” avant la lettre Joseph Conrad’s horror story about Belgian imperialism in Congo (1899; 1902) was published at the same time that Multatuli’s famous book found its first readership. Both told the world about what really happened in the colonies: of the Dutch in the East Indies and of their civilized neighbors, the Belgians, in Africa. For the Dutch Guyana (“West Indies”) their image as extremely cruel and greedy slave holders was established long ago by the books of the Scottish soldier Stedman (ca. 1790) and others. The Asian opium history of the Dutch imperialists and colonists start- ed long before these publications were written. Its chain of opium histo- 1 J.C.Baud, p. 194. 2 J. Beeching, p. 23, 24. In the very British J. Lovell no comparison is made with the Dutch East Indies or whatever other ‘opium realm’. Hans Derks - 9789004225893 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 11:41:33AM via free access 190 chapter thirteen ries documents the “heart of darkness” of world history, the Western assault on a non-Western world. Slaves and opium, the capture of body and mind of non-Westerners in order to establish and expand a Western civilization. Compared to the magnitude of the Opium Problem in this constella- tion, the subject is not popular among the general historians of the 20th- century of all political viewpoints. It is largely left to the willing amateur historian, probably to keep the item in the colorful and spectacular world of popular historiography. Notwithstanding their sometimes remarkable achievements, the disadvantage is that it can be neglected and even dis- missed by the decision-making elite. Its members expect first and fore- most decision legitimating and supporting writings, which are difficult to produce in the opium case. For slavery one can point to the glorious, early 19th-century, British abolition project (Wilberforce), but at the very moment a new wave of fabulous opium profits were pouring out over the Western world. Westerners themselves were still ‘strictly against the use of opium by [their] own people’.3 In this book the Dutch performance must also constitute the “heart of darkness”. It is much less well known than the English one: its history remained in the dark, notwithstanding that it strikes the heart of the Opium Question. The English performance as sketched above can only be perceived as a copy of the Dutch example, which will be discussed below. General elements, from the bullion game4 to the accompanying Christian conversion activities, from the colonial organization to the rise of some protests at the end of the 19th-century, will not be repeated or only referred to in passing. Only the basic elements of the opium business will be highlighted: its initiators, aims, scope, profits or corrupting effects on all levels of society and immanent hypocrisy (first importing it, later condemning the indigenous users of the stuff5). 3 M. Ricklefs (1993), p. 287 note 3. 4 For the serious bullion problems the VOC always had, see the documents in GM, II, 754; IV, 442 ff; V, 232, 415, 498; VI 79, 271, 335, 449; VIII, 30, 81; XII, 78; XIII, 54-58, 162 ff. and so on. It is the difficult story of getting gold and silver, exchanging European coins for indigenous ones, re-minting coins, etc. Many millions of Dutch coins were transported from Holland to the East. Many of the ships involved in these transports were lost due to shipwrecks: the sea route must be a cemetery of ships interesting for treasure hunters like Lara Croft, Indiana Jones, etc., but not for us. See K. Glamann, p. 50-73. 5 Only one example here: Rijklof van Goens, one of the highest and most influential VOC officials around 1660, the admiral who was probably the person most responsible for introducing opium as a mass product along the Malabar coast (see ch. 11), was highly den- igrating towards Javanese aristocrats for using opium. See M. Ricklefs (1993), p. 11. Hans Derks - 9789004225893 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 11:41:33AM via free access The “Violent Opium Company” (VOC) in the East 191 The Dutch Opium Image An obvious question must be answered at the start: What did the first Dutch conquerors, colonizers and merchants in the East know about the product with which they became notoriously linked in history, opium? The answer can be found in two sources. Some of these colonizers judged everything as strange, dangerous, good or bad that deviated from their homeland experience. This background knowledge (which can be differentiated at least between elite and common folk information as the Portuguese example shows) had a local or regional European background, it was not necessarily of purely Dutch origin. A large percentage (40-65%) of the largely illiterate, lower-class personnel of the VOC came from abroad, mainly from war-stricken Germany. This rose to 50-80% by the end of the VOC period.6 The other source of knowledge was based on new experiences as conquerors, traders or colonizers in tropical Asian coun- tries. Let’s elaborate for a while, first, on the homeland knowledge about opium, referring to what was already mentioned in ch. 8 and 10. Laudanum Paracelsi Before 1800 no relevant health infrastructure existed in England, and there was not much difference between the knowledge of learned doctors and mendicant folk-healers. The majority of families in town and country had to rely on their own inherited knowledge and experience in matters of pain and illness. However, in relatively developed and rich cities in Western Europe, like the Flemish or Dutch ones, a rather reasonable health infrastructure already existed in the 17th-century, with hospitals, doctors and apothecar- ies, including an established trade in resources. Local authorities were keen to regulate this still diffuse health market, primarily because they were confronted all too often with serious health hazards. One of the foci of their attention was the medicine distributed or prescribed in town. One symptomatic example will suffice here. In 1663-64 the Flemish city of Ghent issued the following regulation: Article XIV. Because there should be no suspicion of fraud, the [local] apoth- ecaries are not allowed to make [medicines like] the Triakel, Mithridaet ... Laudanum Opiatum ... and the like, unless some of the Doctors College has independently inspected the ingredients needed to compose these 6 F. Gaastra (1991), p. 81. Hans Derks - 9789004225893 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 11:41:33AM via free access 192 chapter thirteen medicines ... whereupon the Doctor has to give a written testimony to the apothecary in which date of the day and year is given when the ingredient was made and the visitation done ... this on pain of a fine of six guilders for every composite without such a testimony and of confiscation of the com- posite ...7 These three opium products had nearly the same price: per 1 dragma (= 3.9 gram), namely 1 stuyver (= five Dutch cents); the triakel was slightly more expensive: seven cents per dragma. The triakel (theriaca, treacle, thériaque) was one of the best known.8 It was imported to Western Europe through Venice, the main mediator between Arab countries and the West. It was apparently invented by one of the internationally famous Arab medical doctors of the 12th and 13th centuries and used as an anti- dote, wonder-drink and the like, esepcially for kings and popes. One of these learned men, the Egyptian Aboul Mena ben Abi Nasr ben Haffahd, made the first manual for apothecaries, the fifth chapter of which concerned opiates (ca. 1250). A French translation from 1844 also mentions the thériaque, composed of about seventy ingredients, of which honey was the largest one and ‘opium choisi’ the second.9 Once the Venetians had distributed the recipe and the product in the second half of the 15th-century, the custom arose of preparing it in public with much pomp, attended by the worldly authorities as well as the “experts”. The sales talk about its use in antiquity by Roman emperors made it more expensive and attractive. As an antidote it was perceived as the ultimate medicine against all dis- eases, pains and other nasty states. Vanderwiele: ‘ ... the triakel is a true panacea. It is immediately clear that the healing effects in particular had 7 L. Vandewiele, p. 11, 12. 8 See P. Boussel, H. Bonnemain, p. 93 ff., 99, 109, 181; M. Lindemann, p. 61, 264; the articles of Wolfgang Schneider and Rudolf Schmitz in G. Völger, K. von Weck (ed.), vol. 2, p. 630-639 and 650-662. Andromachus, a Greek physician to Emperor Nero (AD 54-63) is named as the inventor in Smith’s Classical Dictionary (not in the OCD, Lübker or Kleine Pauly). Pharmacists use the Latin, anyway, theriaca andromachi.