Opium and the Limits of Empire

David Anthony Bello

"The British opium trade along China's seacoast has come to symbolize China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narrative, opium is the primary medium through which China encountered the economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers' arrival on the Chinese coast have become closely linked. Opium, however, was not a Sino-British problem confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, an empire-wide crisis, and its spread among an ethnically diverse populace, which included northwestern Muslims and southwestern tribal peoples, created regionally and culturally distinct problems of control for the Qing state." "This book examines the crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, unlike the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale...

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