Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952
Product Description
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 regime 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.
Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952
Tags:18391952, 1940s, Addictive Substance, Apparent Resolution, Britain, British Imperialism, Capital Formation, China, Chinese Capital, Chinese Merchants, Chinese State, Commodity Trading, East Asia, Imperialists, Japan, Japanese Imperialism, Nineteenth Century, Opium, Opium Problem, Opium Regimes, Opium Trade, Palliative Medicine, Pioneering Research, Poppies, Regimes, State Intervention