The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India

237 Pages·2019·5.015 MB·English

by  Rolf Bauer

The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India
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Library of Economic History
General Editors
Peer Vries (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)
Jeroen Touwen (Leiden University)
volume 12
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lehi
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The Peasant Production
of Opium in
Nineteenth-Century India
By
Rolf Bauer
leiden | boston
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Cover illustration: “Opium Industry: Examination of Opium,” photograph by Bourne & Shepherd, ca. 1920.
With kind permission of the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bauer, Rolf, 1984- author.
Title: The peasant production of opium in nineteenth-century India / by Rolf Bauer.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Library of economic
history, ISSN 1877-3206 ; volume 12 | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2019003725 (print) | lccn 2019015516 (ebook) | isbn
9789004385184 (ebook) | isbn 9789004385177 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Opium trade--India--History--19th century. |
Peasants--India--Economic conditions--19th century. | Forced
labor--India--History--19th century. | Power (Social
sciences)--India--History--19th century. | India--Economic
conditions--19th century. | India--History--British occupation, 1765-1947.
| Great Britain--Colonies--Economic conditions. | Great
Britain--Colonies--Economic policy.
Classification: lcc hd9675.o653 (ebook) | LCC HD9675.O653 I63 2019 (print) |
ddc 338.1/7375095409034--dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003725
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1877-3206
isbn 978-90-04-38517-7 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-38518-4 (e-book)
Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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To Barbara
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Contents
Acknowledgements  ix
List of Illustrations and Tables  xi
Glossary  xiv
Units of Measurement  xv
1 Introduction  1
2 The Creation of a System  11
2.1 A Chronology of the British Opium Monopoly in India  11
2.2 A Further Note on Bengal and Malwa: Two Opium Economies
Intermingled  31
2.3 Keystone of Empire  34
2.4 Opium and China  43
2.5 Auctions  52
2.6 The Sudder Factories  54
3 The Functioning of a System  64
3.1 The Opium Department: A Centralised Bureaucratic
Structure  68
3.2 The Settlement  77
3.3 Laws and Fines  85
3.4 Local Collaboration  92
4 A Local-Level Analysis of an Opium District: Saran  103
4.1 Topography and General Aspects Related to Agriculture  104
4.2 The People of Saran  110
4.3 Distribution of Land Proprietorship and Tenancy  116
4.4 Crops  129
5 The Costs and Benefits of Poppy Cultivation  132
5.1 Poppy within Bihar’s Agriculture  132
5.2 Agricultural Operations of Poppy Cultivation  136
5.3 Who Cultivated Poppies?  140
5.4 Costs and Benefits: An Assessment  144
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viii Contents
6 The Mechanics of a System: Incentives, Coercion and
Dependence  163
6.1 The System of Advance Payments  165
6.2 Sarkar—By Order of the Government  175
6.3 Zamindar—Triadic Relations  184
7 Conclusion  193
Appendix  199
Bibliography  205
Index  216
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Acknowledgements
My entrance into the ‘professional’ academic world (i.e. being able to do
research full-time) was thanks to a Junior Fellowship at the ifk Vienna
in 2012/13.1 I could not think of a better start into an academic career.
Then-Director Helmut Lethen cared for an inspiring and creative intellectual
atmosphere and he made us young fellows feel comfortable. In particular,
I want to thank Florian Baranyi, Verena Bauer, Susanne Beiweis, Stefan Laube,
Martin Mauersberg, Sasa Miletic and Ulrich Schwarz for their companionship
during this year. The ifk also enabled me to spend a semester as a visiting
scholar at New York University’s Department of History. I am deeply grateful to
David Ludden, who helped me organise the stay. Also, I would like to express
my gratitude to Andrew Sartori and the PhD candidates of nyu’s South Asian
History programme for welcoming me and giving me extensive feedback on an
early draft of this study.
While in New York, I had the chance to meet the novelist Amitav Ghosh,
who was kind enough to invite me into his home. At the beginning, I was
both excited and intimidated by talking to my favourite novelist. Eventually,
the meeting turned out to be a wonderful academic discussion about opium.
I cannot overstate how important that conversation was to me in every re-
spect. During the same stage of my research, I met with both Gyan Prakash and
Partha Chatterjee at Princeton and Columbia, respectively. They were both
very generous with their advice and fuelled me with additional motivation.
After New York, I returned to Vienna, to my academic ‘base camp’ at the De-
partment of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, where I
had gotten a four-year contract as research and teaching assistant (2013–17). I
still feel very much at home here and hope that I have the chance to come back
every now and then. In particular, I want to mention the late Markus Cerman
for his encouragement in personal matters and Thomas Ertl for his generous
support of us young scholars at the department. I also want to thank Oliver
Kühschelm for stimulating debates in the kitchen and Manya Rathore for her
wonderful company at lunch. Erich Landsteiner has become a kind of intel-
lectual mentor and above all a good friend. If not for him, I probably would not
have pursued a career in economic history.
Although a vast amount of material on nineteenth-century India has been
scanned in and is available online (e.g. the Reports of the Royal Commission of
Opium), this book could not have been written without conducting research
1 Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften / Kunstuniversität Linz in Wien.
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