1. Introduction

1 Chapter 1 1. Introduction When I tell someone about my research, one of the first things that I do is to ask whether them if they are familiar with Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy. These three novels are set in the first half of the nineteenth century and they deal with the opium trade between India and China. One of the main protagonists is Deeti, a Bihari opium peasant. I read about Deeti and her husband, who worked in the nearby opium factory, only shortly after I had started to develop an academic interest in the peasant production of opium in nineteenth-century India. I was delighted when I found out that Amitav Ghosh was already working on the two sequels of the trilogy, which meant that his novels would accompany me during my research in the subsequent years. Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) were not just a joyous supplement to a serious corpus of academic texts. But these novels are so profoundly researched and well-written that I consider them among the best material available on the subject. The following quote from Sea of Poppies summarises this book: In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household's needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory's appetite for opium seemed never to be sated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign asámi contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn't accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the opium and would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance.1 Ghosh’s protagonist was one of many North Indian peasants producing crude opium for the British Indian government. At the height of the colonial opium industry almost 1.5 million small peasant 1 Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 30–31. 2 households cultivated the highly labour intensive poppy plant on their fields and they then delivered the harvested raw opium to the nearest government opium office. A few thousand workers—men, women and children—manufactured the peasants’ produce in two large opium factories on the river Ganges. They dried and mixed the semi-liquid substance, formed it into cakes the size of a melon and then packed the opium balls into chests made of mango wood. The government’s opium industry was one of the largest enterprises on the subcontinent, producing a few thousand tons of the drug every year—a similar output to Afghanistan’s notorious opium industry today, which supplies the global market for heroin. However, unlike the illicit trade in Afghanistan, India’s colonial opium economy was a legal business that was not only sanctioned but organised and actively promoted by the state. The profits yielded by the sales of the drug to private traders at auctions in Calcutta were categorised as public revenue. Opium was, for the largest part of the nineteenth century, the second most important source of revenue for the colonial state and it was only outmatched by the taxes that the government collected on land. The question then arises of how the British would have financed their colonial enterprise on the subcontinent without opium. Although opium has had a long history in the region as both a medicinal and recreational drug, it was only under British rule that it became a major item of trade. Exports increased from 4,000 chests per year at the beginning of the nineteenth century to over 60,000 chests in the 1880s. The success of the opium trade was partly achieved by military means. Two wars forced China to open its doors for British Indian opium. Within India, a large and well-organised bureaucratic apparatus was mainly responsible for the growth and the longevity of the colonial opium business. At the end of the eighteenth century, the East India Company (EIC) declared a monopoly on opium, which actually also involved monopsony control. All production of opium was for the state and all sale was done through the state. The EIC installed an Opium Department which administered and controlled the monopoly. The Department—or Opium Agency—was among the most visible colonial institutions in rural India with about one hundred offices spread over an area reaching from the north-eastern corner of today’s Uttar Pradesh to the south-western corner of Bihar. Its ca. 2.500 clerks monitored the poppy cultivators closely, enforced contracts and ensured that quality standards were met. While in other major sectors of India’s economy, like indigo or textiles, entrepreneurs faced regular setbacks and final defeats, the state-run opium industry remained in place and without major interruptions for over a century.2 One important reason for this success was 2 See Kranton and Swamy “Contracts,” and Roy and Swamy, Law, 130–34. 3 without a doubt the fact that the Opium Department was a strong governmental institution, which was backed up by a legislature that equipped its clerks with a police-like authority. The Department was an institution that had the means to enforce opium upon India’s peasantry. This book is about the North Indian peasants who cultivated poppy for the Opium Department. It is about the millions of people who sowed their most fertile plot of land with a plant that demanded an extraordinarily high input of resources and labour. I am centrally concerned with the economic conditions under which these peasants produced opium for the British Indian government, particularly with whether they cultivated at a loss or whether they yielded a commensurate income. So far, historians have been rather vague about the situation of North India’s poppy cultivators. Carl Trocki, for example, writes that ‘opium could not be cultivated at a profit by most Indian ryots [peasants]’ and that they ‘appear to have been unwilling to cultivate opium’.3 However, Trocki’s assessment lacks an empirical test and thus remains rather speculative. John F. Richards, who without doubt has made the most important contributions to the topic, also seemed to be insecure with regards to the poppy cultivators’ situation. In a paper of 2007, he wrote that poppy cultivation was a ‘profitable activity for peasant farmers’, while 26 years earlier he was less optimistic and argued that ‘the state monopoly did keep the price of crude opium just on the economic edge’.4 Coming to a more definitive conclusion about the economic conditions of poppy cultivation is relevant for a few reasons. First, because it had an impact on the lives of around 10 million people in North India.5 In the region administered by the Bihar Division of the Opium Department, every other household produced opium. Second, the fact that opium was a major cash-crop affecting a large part of the rural population made it a central element in arguments about the transformation of India’s economy during British rule. Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of incorporation, which describes the process of India, among other regions, being forcibly turned into a producer of cheap raw materials, relies heavily on the assumption that cash-crop production (in general) and opium production (in particular) worsened the peasant producers’ livelihood.6 ‘Cash-crop production’, Wallerstein argues, 3 Trocki, Opium, 66. 4 Richards, “Moral Economy,” 75 and Idem., “Indian Empire,” 78. 5 At the height of the industry, almost 1.5 million peasants were registered as poppy cultivators. Behind each of these registered cultivators was a household of an average of seven persons. Thus, I conclude that poppy cultivation affected around 10 million people. 6 Wallerstein refers to four major cash-crop in the context of India’s incorporation: indigo, cotton, silk and opium. Wallerstein, World-System III, 153. 4 ‘[…] offered little intrinsic attraction, since it inevitably reduced the time for and physical availability of all sorts of subsistence practices which offered guarantees of survival and even of relative well- being.’7 However, the way that Wallerstein underpins his argument is somewhat problematic. With reference to the works of Irfan Habib and Percival Spear, he shows that per capita agricultural output and the standard of food consumption were higher in Mughal India than around 1900, from which he seems to conclude that the commercialisation of agriculture during British rule led to a general decline of agricultural productivity and living standards.8 Wallerstein’s macro-level approach is symptomatic for other major studies concerned with the economic impact of British rule on the subcontinent.9 A macro-level perspective, although useful for the grand narratives of these authors, is problematic because it cannot grasp the many details of peasant production that are necessary to determine the impact of agricultural commercialisation on the peasant producers.

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