Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 - Softcover

Brook, Timothy; Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520222369 ISBN 13: 9780520222366

Publisher: University of California Press, 2000

Synopsis

Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor for a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century, to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century, to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s.

Together these essays show that the complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Brook is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and the author most recently of the prizewinning The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (California, 1998). Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi is Professor of History at York University in Toronto and the author of Japanese Loyalism Reconstrued (1995), among other works.

From the Back Cover

Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a high-value commodity, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor of a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s.

Avoiding the Eurocentric focus of earlier approaches, this volume relies on the concept of "opium regimes" in Asia -- the regional and local systems that states, corporations, and civic associations set up either to profit from or suppress the opium trade. By focusing on these opium regimes, the authors are able to investigate the systematic and comprehensive character of drug-control structures, stressing their capacity for operating in the political realm. The complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520222369
• ISBN 13: 9780520222366
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 456