In this beautifully penned and scrupulously researched book, Diana S. Kim returns our attention to the opium prohibition regimes of Southeast Asia. For an era so thoroughly picked over by generations of historians, Kim shows us there is still so much to learn, and indeed to unlearn, about what we know of colonial opium regimes. Few, she argues, have taken seriously the puzzle of how and why colonial states untethered themselves from the revenue generated by opium tax farms in Southeast Asia. Her research contributes to our understanding of this period by highlighting the role of local colonial administrators in reshaping and ultimately hastening the end of colonial opium regimes.

The author disaggregates the colonial state, putting to rest deeply held teleological assumptions about its decline. She does this by emphasizing how opium regimes were first problematized and then contested outright by “weak actors” undertaking everyday bureaucratic processes of colonial governance. Kim shows us how practices of census, registry, and memo enabled colonial administrators first to recast opium as a problem that required state intervention and consequently to restructure the fiscal architecture of the colonial state to account for the decline in state revenue. In so doing, the author pushes back on renderings of the local apparatus as pathologically corrupt, self-interested, midi-elites who were imperiously disassociated with the workings of the colony. By unraveling the monolithic colonial state, she reveals hitherto unrecognized contestation between the colony and the metropole about how, when, and why states should abandon their fiscal dependence on opium. Remarkably, these exchanges are at their most heated not when initiated by experts in public health or social welfare, but in the neglected departments of taxation, treasury, and customs, where administrators produced the most surprising fiscal innovations. It was here, at the heart of the state where rule and revenue have often seemed unquestionably intertwined, that administrators became increasingly ambivalent about taxing vice as a means to colonial state formation. That these “weak actors” were ultimately successful in their disruption of colonial opium regimes, she argues, speaks to the symbolic power of the state to name, identify, and generate categories of knowledge that beg certain policy solutions. Symbolic power, for Kim, thus forms the grammar of regulation.

Kim has divided the book deftly into three main sections. Part I articulates her main argument, provides a historical background to her account, and reviews segments of the existing literature on Southeast Asian opium regimes, highlighting the gaps and divergencies between forms and periods of opium governance that are often brushed over. In the second part, Kim presents the evidence for her case based on the opium monopolies of British Burma, British Malaya, and French Indochina. These case studies are not just an ambitious spatial and temporal sweep of opium regimes in the region: they also represent regimes of varying fiscal dependency on opium revenue. At the height of revenue collections in British Burma, for instance, opium only ever topped 10%, halving to 5% by the late 1910s and continuing to decline. In British Malaya, opium revenue charted a choppier path, jerking to a peak of 57% in 1915 but then declining there as well, to 30% in the 1920s. In French Indochina where local state expansion was a direct product of opium taxation, revenues nonetheless decreased 10 percentage points from 30% in 1899 to less than 20% in the 1920s. Kim concludes, “It is difficult to read the records of opium monopolies and envision a colonial state obsessed with maximizing opium revenue, or indeed find evidence of local administrators cagily hiding profits. For there was so much more going on” (p. 85). Part of what was going on, as described by Kim, were fiscal innovations, from the well-deliberated opium revenue reserve fund in British Malaya to shoddy accounting workarounds that nearly broke the back of Indochina’s finances.

Missing from the book is a more comprehensive review of the theoretical approaches that have underlined scholarly contributions to the study of the colonial opium monopoly in Southeast Asia, juxtaposed against Kim’s own argument. Some of the best examples of the opium monopoly scholarship have charted how addiction drove the development of modern Southeast Asian capitalism. Who can forget that heart-stopping passage in Carl Trocki’s 1991 book, Opium and Empire, where opium is graphically depicted as the engine of labor for the thousands of emaciated, dying natives working Southeast Asia’s railroads, mines, and plantations? Kim cites it in full but at various points in her text, the author admonishes the historical materialist agenda so central to the work of scholars like Trocki. Not every plantation, she points out, kept its workforce addicted and indebted; not every administrator was an “imperial human[ist] aimed at protecting the commercial life of opium” (p. 29); not every official colonial denouncement of opium should be smirked at knowingly as an “alibi of the powerful” (p. 64). These observations, and there are many, are helpful correctives to the record, but I longed for a toothier, more fulsome theoretical review in which existing frameworks would be critically articulated and situated against the author’s own theoretical position. Doing so would have added urgency to the valuable contribution of this monograph.

I also felt that the book missed the opportunity to interrogate and extend the clear tensions in the colonial opium monopoly between moral and political economy as a theoretical contribution. Kim adeptly demonstrates that self-interested revenue maximization is not the sole guiding force of state formation. But what then does the author wish us to make of the relationship between rule and revenue? She asks us to consider the incremental, highly localized, and often piecemeal pace of regulatory change (p. 204) that derails any easy pairing of rule and revenue, but what does this finding do to reconfigure, reshape, or reject the conventional, critical, or, in Kim’s own words, “comfortable” (p. 220) political economy analyses that have so defined this field?

Part III of Empires of Vice explores the “afterlives of colonial Southeast Asia’s opium monopolies” (p. 213) through two world wars and into the postcolonial era. This is heady and exciting stuff. Kim charts the emergence of regimes of punishment for opium users and smugglers, even as the recommitment to prohibition was variously partial and messy, if not informally rescinded. For some postcolonial states, fiscal “innovations” were transformed into “secret finances” generated through the emergence and consolidation of an illicit political economy of narcotics. The unpredictable legacy of Southeast Asia’s colonial opium regimes hovers closely, like a noose around the neck.