The historiography of empire is rife with examinations of the push and pull between metropolitan directives and colonial realities. Yet much of this work focuses on high-ranking officials and local, often nationalist, responses to their policies, leaving out an important part of the colonial picture—the work of hundreds of low-level bureaucrats and administrators who had to reconcile the plans of high-ranking officials with complex, dynamic social contexts of the colonies. In Empires of Vice, Diana Kim uses the rise of opium prohibition to show how the work of these low-ranking officials made them far more than mere instruments of the metropole. Lowly opium policy administrators, long oversimplified as accountants balancing the columns of state revenue and “moral wreckage” (92), were, in fact, largely responsible for the zeitgeist within which the prohibition of opium in Southeast Asia became possible.

The book is organized into three parts. Part one examines the distribution and regulation of opium through monopolies. Through the management of these monopolies, administrators began the construction of opium as a colonial problem. Despite the considerable revenue opium monopolies often earned, many local administrators were conflicted about the use of opium by various colonized populations. Once this view of opium began to percolate up through colonial hierarchies back to the metropole, activists there took the relatively small step to conceive of opium sales to support colonial government as a quite unnecessary evil.

Though colonial administrators were not deaf to anti-opium agitation in the metropole, local circumstances were far more influential in determining how they understood the opium problem. This eclipsing of the imperial by the local can be seen in the strikingly different forms of monopolies that were established across the three colonies in question. The historical and demographic peculiarities of each colony rendered it impossible to develop a unitary perspective on opium. Nevertheless, by the 1890s local administrators’ ethical concerns regarding opium were broadly adopted and amplified by metropolitan administrators.

Part two includes a chapter dedicated to the functioning of the opium monopoly in each of the three colonies in the study. Kim begins with Burma, where, she argues, the problem of colonial “moral wreckage” (94) resulting from opium policy first took form. Excise officers in Akyab, influenced by general feeling held by the British there that local opium use was causing deleterious effects, investigated. Believing the indigenous population incapable of moderating opium use, administrators attempted numerous interventions to reduce access to the drug. These new efforts, most of which failed to assuage growing fears, lent further confirmation that Akyab typified the “moral wreckage” caused by the opium trade. As Akyab fell into opium-fueled moral ruin, so too could the rest of Burma and eventually other colonies. Local officials whose job it was to regulate opium access became convinced of the incompatibility of government-supervised opium monopolies with rational and just colonial rule.

With the “truth” of moral ruin now established in officialdom, local administrators in British Malaya struggled with a special problem. In British Malaya, there was a greater degree of comfort with extant usage patterns, which, demographically speaking, centered on the large Chinese expatriate population. The fact that the opium tax system had proven so remarkably successful in raising revenue for the colonial state also mitigated against possible changes. Ironically, it was this very financial success that made the “opium problem” salient there; opium revenue comprised an exceptionally large percentage of all revenue in British Malaya. Colonial administrators struggled to determine how the colony might remain solvent if eventually forced to give up opium revenue and that required the development of the opium revenue replacement reserve fund. With this instrument, British Malaya was positioned to survive the loss of opium revenue. Yet the very planning of the reserve fund heralded an acceleration of international anti-opium sentiments because a colony that had considerable financial incentives for keeping opium policies static indefinitely was planning in a very real way for the absence of opium revenue.

French Indochina would see many of the same tensions present within the British Empire in their own regulation of opium use. However, their control over the trade was much more tenuous due to some calamitous early decisions such as purchasing seventy-five tons of poor-quality opium from a Chinese warlord. With tons of low-quality opium rotting on the shelves and the need to supply saleable opium to extant consumers, local administrators busied themselves with keeping mismanagement out of the eyes of elite officialdom rather than with justifying colonial rule through enlightened opium policies.

The final part explores the long-term implications of the opium control regime first born in the colonial context. During the Second World War, both Axis and Allied powers continued to regulate and profit from the opium trade. In the postwar period, newly independent regimes kept opium regulation as a preserve of state power, viewing it as a function of its duty to protect the health of their populations from the moral wreckage of opium. Now, as then, state regulation and policing of opium requires a strong, interventionist state. When that regulation and policing fails, it serves as evidence for the need of an even stronger, more interventionist state.

Kim's book effectively relocates low-level colonial administrators from the periphery of discourse surrounding opium to the center and reframes them as the key actors. One element that might be fleshed out more is the role of non-European temperance activists in constructing the problem of opium for local administrators. Their activities certainly would have put them squarely in the orbit of day-to-day low-level colonial administration. Nevertheless, Empires of Vice is well researched, with sources ranging from government records and meeting minutes to personal papers from state and private archives. It is written in an accessible style and will be of value to scholars of Southeast Asia, drugs history, and colonialism.