Although addressing primarily a China history audience, this book, centred on the evolution of the opium trade as a business in Fujian, contains much that will inform and should inspire scholars of colonial Southeast Asia to take another look at the well-trodden histories of opium and state-formation.
Opium has mostly been approached as a problem of state- and elite-formation in the colonial historiography of Southeast Asia. The classic works of James Rush (Dutch Java) and Carl Trocki (British Straits Settlements) revealed how closely interwoven were the interests of colonial states and their Chinese opium revenue farmers, with the latter providing between 30 per cent and 80 per cent of state revenue for much of the nineteenth century (see Trocki, Opium and empire: Chinese society in colonial Singapore, 1800–1910, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990; James Rush, Opium to Java: Revenue farming and Chinese enterprise in colonial Indonesia, 1860–1910, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). More recently, Diana Kim shows for British Burma, French Indochina, and the British Straits Settlements (and Malaya), that the timing and form of colonial bureaucracy's takeover of opium imports and retailing in the early twentieth century, followed path-dependent developments specific to each colony's history—the peculiar mix of their opium clientele between immigrants and natives, the extent of each state's reliance on opium revenues, and varying bureaucratic modes of information gathering and knowledge production (see Diana Kim, Empires of vice: The rise of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Insofar as they are interested in the question of smuggling, these classic works show that the colonial authorities had to constantly adjust their own revenue expectations against the opium revenue farmers’ over-optimistic bids, and their consequent exposure to smuggling and the risk of bankruptcies.
Thilly upends this state-centric approach by taking the opium smugglers on the Fujianese coast as the principal actors, whose story he so masterfully assembles and tells. Reminiscent of the historiographical move to treat pirates not as criminals but as social bandits, the work ‘starts from the premise that opium was first and foremost a commodity’, (p. 3) rather than a contraband or a licensed-for-sale item.
The originality of the first half of Thilly's story is partly attributable to late imperial China's unique history in Asia as a semi-colonised polity, which was nominally still in control of its borders and some form of tax collection. Before the First Opium War, lineages based on the Fujianese coast were quick to exploit the business opportunities that opened up as fast-sailing British opium clippers dropped anchor off the bays facing their neighbourhoods, in order to circumvent the Qing government's limitation of foreign (and opium) trade to Canton (Guangzhou) (Chapter 2). Thilly shows that, in between both opium wars, local authorities reached a ‘negotiated’ understanding of ‘illegality’ with the British country traders and their Fujianese business partners, by tolerating the trade as long as it took place beyond the geographical limits of the treaty ports (Chapter 3). With the legalisation of opium, the Fujianese opium traders tried to evade not so much the British-run Imperial Maritime Customs officer (enforcing import tariffs), but provincial collectors of the lijin (domestic commercial/transportation) tax, which, in Fujian's case, was extremely high as it was used to fund the Fuzhou Naval Dockyard military experiment (Chapter 4).
The latter half of the book, pivoting in geographical coverage to the Fujianese diaspora's trading networks in the Nanyang, and the international treaty port, Xiamen, is more directly relevant to the Southeast Asia-oriented reader. Most intriguingly, Thilly shows that, as opium became a colonial government-operated monopoly in Southeast Asia after 1906, Fujian-produced opium, and foreign-imported heroin and cocaine were (re-)packaged in the province, and then smuggled into Singapore, and across the rest of colonised Southeast Asia (Chapter 5). Finally, turning to the opium den and brothel scene in urban Xiamen, Thilly demonstrates how local Fujianese businessmen pretended to be Japanese subjects during the 1920s and 1930s in order to exploit the legal advantages and tax incentives conferred by extraterritorial rights, which the Japanese alone exerted on behalf of their ethnic Chinese subjects (Chapter 6).
Smugglers do not like to leave behind a paper trail. Yet Thilly is able to reconstruct such compelling stories about the opium business on the China coast, precisely because not all ‘smugglers’ saw themselves as such. The archives of Jardine Matheson & Company — a company engaged ‘openly’ in opium runs on the Fujian coast — complete with account books and market reports, allowed the author to contextualise his stories with fine estimates of the general volume of the opium imports into China for the late nineteenth century. In other instances, where he had to rely on the archival trail produced by (international) state surveillance or criminal prosecution, the business histories that emerge are necessarily less granular although no less illuminating. It is no doubt to the credit of the author's persistence in ‘following the money’, across no less than 14 archives based in six countries, that we now have such an original piece of scholarship in our hands.
I will end by outlining two ways this book may inform and inspire further research in Southeast Asian studies. First, the still largely China-centric story the author tells in the first half of the book deserves further research from a Southeast Asian, and more specifically, colonial-Hokkien Singaporean framing. Given the close ties between the Hokkien Chinese and the British country traders, it is hard to imagine how some of the collaborative business strategies were not first hatched in early colonial Singapore. Second, Thilly's landmark oeuvre is a reminder to our field that we have not, to my knowledge, had another monograph-length contribution to the history of business/smuggling since Eric Tagliacozzo's by now classic Secret trades, porous borders (Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret trades, porous borders: Smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, 1865–1915, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). If Tagliacozzo was mainly interested in historicising the process of state-formation along the colonial Anglo-Dutch maritime border, Thilly's book shows how the time may be ripe for us to take another look at ‘smuggling’ in our region at the nexus of crime, business and the history of capitalism.
