Narco-legal Cultures of Compromise: The Ambiguous Status of Opium in Qing China and British India

David Bello, Washington and Lee University.”  Narco-legal Cultures of Compromise:  the Ambiguous Status of Opium in Qing China and British India”
      The opium trade’s ability to compromise state structures of prohibition and even regulated production and consumption was a critical reason for the drug’s status as one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities and a premier source of revenue and profit.  The paper will examine aspects of the legal ambiguities arising from opium production, consumption and trafficking under two different Eurasian orders, Qing China and British India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Despite genuine differences in the drug’s ostensible status in both realms, these ambiguities conditioned the ultimate state response that was, in practice, a compromise with domestic and foreign opium drug cultures resulting in a much wider narco-legalization than had previously existed in either.