Diana S. Kim's evocatively titled first book, Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia, begins with an intriguing paradox. How did opium shift from being a vaunted source of imperial state revenue to being a reviled source of imperial vice and immorality at the turn of the twentieth century? How should one understand the transformation of imperial logics, and the variegated authoritative claims that undergirded them, that impelled such dramatic changes in colonial opium regulation across Southeast Asia? These compelling questions lead Kim to make key interventions in the study of imperial governance, bureaucracy, and policy making across multiple disciplines, from history and political science to sociology and area studies.

Rather than examining policies radiating out from European metropoles, Empires of Vice investigates the processual nature of policy making grounded in the nitty-gritty paperwork of local imperial administrators stationed within the colonies. As Kim lucidly writes, these “minor agents of imperial rule” might have been “poor theorists” of intellectual debates of the time, but they were nevertheless “rich empiricists of colonial reality,” using their authority and experience in the field to reconstruct what was once considered a “tolerable vice” into “official problems” (pp. 4, 40). States wielded power not only through public symbols and labels, she argues, but also through the slow and ambivalent formation of an official language, one that would be honed cumulatively in the very process of creating and interpreting administrative paperwork within the colonial bureaucracy (pp. 7, 11). By focusing on local processes of colonial governance and by tracing its impact on the rise of opium regulations in British and French colonial Southeast Asia, Empires of Vice reveals that beneath the confident veneer of imperial regulatory control lies an untold prior history, one filled with tensions and anxieties surrounding the problem of opium, which no administrative body could wholly resolve, let alone universally define, but was nevertheless tasked to overcome.

The history of opium is a dauntingly complex topic for any one scholar, and it can be tackled from multiple angles, regions, and disciplines. Kim is refreshingly honest about what her book does and does not do, while giving her readers the tools to seek out other approaches and histories through an expertly integrated overview of its vast historiography and scholarship. I consider this to be an invaluable service to her readers. Moreover, the book is structured in three parts, which, like a finely crafted hourglass, guide readers from broad theories and historiographies to fine-grained case studies, and finally to a discussion of colonial legacies.

Part one is the macronarrative, which includes an introductory chapter, a second chapter on the theoretical claims and stakes of the argument, and a third chapter on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of opium. Here, Kim integrates multiple historiographies to argue for opium's uneven formation as an official problem across different imperial regimes within the region. Part two is the micronarrative, which lays out three layered case studies across eight decades in three different parts of Southeast Asia: chapter 4 takes place in British Burma (1870s–1890s), chapter 5 in British Malaya (1890s–1920s), and chapter 6 in French Indochina (1920s–1940s). Each chapter takes a deep dive into the papered world of bureaucratic interpretive decision-making. Each chapter explores specific conditions and contexts through which on-the-ground administrators ultimately arrived at their differing claims for, and definitions of, opium reform. Each chapter seamlessly weaves a detailed narrative based on painstaking archival research in both Europe and Southeast Asia. The third and final part of this book includes a seventh chapter on the legacies of colonialism and opium monopolies after World War II, and a conclusion that reflects on the “felt discomfort” arising from such a study of colonial bureaucracy and its powerful but imperfect logic of rule (p. 220).

Empires of Vice is a deeply compelling and provocative book, one that should insightfully challenge conventional impulses surrounding the cultural politics of colonialism and its history in Southeast Asia. Toward the end, in a moment of exceptional honesty and reflection, Kim asks her readers to consider “the value of feeling uncomfortable” in the attempt to understand how and why individuals working in colonial bureaucracies acted, reasoned, and claimed authority in the process of dominating others (p. 224). She had initially expected to encounter the totalizing force of the colonial state; instead, she found “small fissures” in the banal operations of colonial administrative paperwork, which led to the legitimization of different regulatory policies asserting colonial control (pp. 220-21). Through a careful demonstration of the slow unfolding of opium regulations across Southeast Asia, she invites her readers to think carefully about how narratives of historical action, intention, and consequence can be unexpectedly messy, reshaping how one understands the pulse of power that linked structure and agency, contingency and outcome, and colonial anxiety and control. Empires of Vice will be the book to read and reread, if not to learn about pivotal moments in the history of colonial opium regulation, then to reflect on the connections between small individual actions and lasting societal consequences, not only for the dead but also for the living.