Long before Burma would take its place in the “Golden Triangle”, colonial Burma was peripheral to the opium trade. Sandwiched between British India, which produced opium for foreign markets and China (the largest of those markets), the regulation of opium in Burma was determined by its larger colonial context. Ashley Wright’s work shows that British concern for maintaining imperial power and the opium profits supporting it were the most important factors informing Burmese opium policies from the 1820’s until decolonisation. Although, concern for the morality and health of the Burmese people appeared in the rhetoric defending Britain’s opium policies, these concerns were couched in language that reproduced the racial hierarchies and paternalism upon which the ideology of empire depended. As Wright puts it: “[C]ontrol of opium and imperial rule were bound together in complex ways, with opium and its regulation influencing and influenced by the imperial power’s desire to regulate labor, the construction of racial discourses, and the networked context of imperial power” (61).
The first chapter examines opium use in precolonial Burma and ends with early opium policies adopted after the colonial annexation of Arakan and Tenasserim in 1826. Since little opium was produced in Burma before British rule, users had to purchase expensive imported opium. The costs associated with opium, along with the Buddhist proscription against it, confined its use to elites. With Chinese migration to the area, this changed during the period of British rule. This dovetailed with the desire for a cheap and opium-fed Chinese labour force in large-scale operations like tin mining. British administrators would blame the increase of opium consumption on Chinese migrants by seeing its use as a quintessentially “Chinese” tradition that did little to harm the labourers and helped with labour extraction.
This belief in the relative harmlessness of opium use for Chinese labourers did not extend to ethnic Burmese. The first chapter recounts the case of Tenasserim’s first commissioner, A.D. Maingy, whose racialised views on opium use would influence policies for over a hundred years. Maingy worked to ensure that Chinese labourers employed in Burma had continued access to opium but expressed alarm at the perceived increase of opium use and associated criminality among ethnic Burmese. Although his recommendations were not immediately adopted, the tensions emerging from his Janus-faced view of opium in Burma proved long-lasting; the paternalistic nature of imperial ideology, which included care for lesser “races”, conflicted with the goal of efficient labour extraction from subject populations.
Chapter 2 examines how these conflicting goals were manifested in the continued evolution of opium policy in Burma. By the 1850’s, international activists had organized against the opium trade. London’s Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade successfully convinced large numbers of people, even within colonial administrations, of opium’s harmful impact. However, despite some agreement regarding opium’s harmful effects, exceptions remained. Opium was not equally harmful to all “races” and colonial administrators maintained that opium had numerous “legitimate” uses within, and increasingly confined to, western medicine.
The third chapter expands on the dangers generally associated with opium by the 1880’s. The scientific racism of Victorian Britain suggested that these negative effects were more pernicious for some races than others. For Chinese people the effect was believed marginal, but for Burmese people it was catastrophic. Anti-opium crusaders in London and colonial administrators were united in the belief that the British Empire should protect ethnic Burmese from the scourge of opium.
Chapter 4 examines Burmese aspects of the Royal Commission on Opium. Published in 1895, the report presents the tensions between the paternalism of imperial ideology and nexus of political and economic relationships that maintained its profitability. Those contributing to the Royal Commission’s findings in Burma were elites and most were British. Chinese commercial interests were also well represented while ethnic Burmese were decidedly less so. The Commission iterated the notion that opium was injurious to ethnic Burmese. Yet Burma was not peopled by one ethnicity alone. As a consequence of annexation and migration, it was also home to large numbers of Chinese immigrants along with Shan and Kachin populations whose use of opium had been more liberal than in the south. Burmese nationalists began to blame ethnic Chinese for the spread of opium use among the youth of Burma. They proved even better scapegoats for colonial administrators, despite the fact that growing numbers of licenses for the sale of opium were being awarded to non-Chinese. Any apparent increase in opium consumption was merely an unfortunate consequence of administrators meeting the needs of local non-Burmese populations. Anxieties regarding its use within Burma testified to the empire’s “noble” task of balancing the needs of its diverse subjects.
The following chapter examines the case of nearby Assam, where anti-opium sentiment was far more vocal among the local population. Over half of the Indian witnesses to testify on opium use in Assam argued for its prohibition. Colonial administrators worried that unrest might follow, as it had in 1861 when it outlawed poppy cultivation there. Tea planters who anticipated higher taxes as a consequence of losing excise revenue also expressed worry. As a result, no substantial regulatory changes were made. In Assam, as in Burma, concern for colonial subjects took a back seat to the overarching goal of colonial administration—to perpetuate colonial rule.
The turn of the century brought change to opium regulation on a global scale. Chapter 6 shows how anti-opium activists changed their tactics to take advantage of an internationalist turn of politics. As a consequence, colonial administrators found themselves subjected to growing international scrutiny in the League of Nations and other forums. Paternal internationalists with the imprimatur of western science increasingly circumscribed the “legitimate” use of opium. This forced colonial administrators into the awkward position of publicly celebrating this turn while working behind closed doors against it.
Chapters 8 and 9 look at the acceleration of this trend. While colonial administrators lauded the goals of the growing consensus on opium’s dangers, their dogged refusal to make substantial regulatory changes drew criticism from increasingly vocal Burmese nationalists. Burmese nationalists found in opium a rallying point for championing both independence and nativism. Opium and the people associated with its use were foreign elements that were injurious to the Burmese people. A little more information regarding the anti-opium sentiments of Burmese nationalists in their own words would add some depth to the narrative. Internationally, the U.S. pressured Britain towards prohibition, placing them in the awkward position of lauding the goal of reducing consumption while opposing moves to reduce opium consumption as impractical.
Wright draws evidence primarily from government reports and private papers held in British archives. This evidence is ideal for showing how the tensions between the ideology of empire and the realities of maintaining its material success were manifested in Burmese opium policy. Wright’s monograph is successful in demonstrating for specialists how the guiding principle of opium policy in Burma was, from its very inception, focused on the maintenance of imperial control—the control of labour, of wealth, and of the bodies of its subjects.
