Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (review)

British India has often been referred to as a narco-fiscal-military state—that is, a militaristic state financed by land revenues and the trade in opium. From the 1780s, narcotics grew steadily in importance as a source of income for the British administration. Imports of Chinese tea—exported in turn to Europe—trebled in the decade after 1784, and with revenue from land taxes less than anticipated, the only way to pay for imports was to export more goods to China. As the Chinese were notoriously indifferent to most foreign goods, the Company concentrated on supplying opium, a drug for which there was great demand, despite attempts to prohibit its use.

In the ensuing years, profits from the sale of the drug escalated, so that by the 1820s one-seventh of British India's total revenue was derived from opium. Until 1833 the East India Company enjoyed a monopoly of trade with China, but in that year it began to face competition from private traders. The combination of this and the mounting costs of maintaining a large army in India led the British to take a more aggressive policy with respect to the China trade, culminating in the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1858-60—the latter beginning as the British Crown took direct control of India after the Mutiny-Rebellion of 1857. The second of the wars resulted in the treaty of Nanking, which ceded Hong Kong and five other Treaty Ports to Britain, allowing it to import and distribute goods in China with few impediments.

These events form the backdrop to Paul C. Winther's study of the opium trade and British rule in India. He observes that the British faced two serious problems as far as opium was concerned: the first was mounting criticism of the ethical and health dimensions of the trade; the second was the declining revenue from opium sales, once the Company faced competition from other suppliers after the end of its monopoly. In order to maintain a veneer of legitimacy, the British, according to Winther, fell back on the argument that opium (and especially one of its components, narcotine) was among the most useful drugs in treating malaria; more useful, in many circumstances, than quinine, the most popular alternative. As Winther points out, this claim had no basis in fact, and was spurious even at the time. It was, rather, merely a "tactic to preserve British hegemony in South Asia" (p. 4).

In making his case, Winther concentrates mostly on the last few years of the period covered by the book, dealing with the evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Opium during 1893-95. In the Commission's report, all of the arguments advanced by campaigners against the opium trade were refuted, largely on the grounds that the drug was useful medicinally and had few harmful side effects if used wisely. This went against the grain of medical and popular opinion in Britain, which was increasingly convinced of the detrimental effects of opium use.

Winther is correct to stress the division of British and Anglo-Indian medical opinion from the 1860s. Most historians of medicine in British India would agree that British doctors in India were increasingly at odds with the metropolitan profession on many issues relating to the causation and treatment of disease, particularly cholera and malarial fevers. They would agree, too, that Anglo-Indian medical opinion was often used to justify the government's opposition to measures that it regarded as impediments to trade or as likely to inflame Indian opinion. Yet Winther is rather too deterministic in his treatment of the relationship between politics and medical theory. He does not give sufficient weight to the force of tradition and experience in Anglo-Indian medical thinking, and does not stress sufficiently the broad consensus that existed in India that...