Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh

Book Review

Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories (2023)

by Amitav Ghosh

  Indian author Amitav Ghosh is best known for his Ibis Trilogy, three books of historical fiction set during the first Opium War.  In India and the UK he is a well known prize winner, in the US he's basically known for the Ibis Trilogy- the first book of which has over 4,000 Amazon reviews.  The only book by Ghosh I've read is The Shadow Line (1988), another work of (partition era) historical fiction that takes place in the UK and in modern day Bangladesh.  I checked Smoke and Ashes out from the library because I've often had the feeling during my visits to Boston that Boston must have been balls deep into the Opium trade back in the day, but you never read anything about it.  Compare the treatment of the opium trade to the treatment of the slave trade- those participants have long since been outed, their statues sometimes removed, etc.

  Certainly you can learn from this book among other that when perpetrating immoral activity for great profit it is best to handle the immoral activity far from home and then bring the riches back.   Ghosh is no historian, though as he points out repeatedly, his technique for writing historical fiction closely mirrors the method of the historian, minus having to learn other languages.   Thus, Smoke and Ashes is hugely entertaining, and largely focused on the task at hand but with some digressions, including several chapters on the current opiates crisis in the United States and its roots/historical ironies in the history contained in this book.  I found most of those observations obvious and the kind of thing that would only be interesting to a reader with no grasp of current events in the US.

  On the other hand, his material about the production and export of opium from Bengal to China is very interesting since, as Ghosh points out, the British took great pains to conceal their activity.  There are, for example, hardly any pictorial depictions of the giant opium factories that provided the lions share of British overseas revenue for generations.  You would think that an Empire so interested in promoting its empirical triumphs would be a model of an Opium Factory in Trafalgar square.  In the end, the thesis is depressing and familiar to anyone familiar with the past half millennium of global capitalism: From great crimes come great fortunes.