Most European empires heavily trafficked in psychoactive commodities. But the British Empire of the “long” nineteenth century trafficked in them more heavily than most. Some of those commodities came to be seen as not only innocuous but even healthy for their consumers, notably tea. Others came to be seen as potentially very harmful indeed, notably opium and (later) its derivatives, morphine and heroin. Yet until the early twentieth century, the imperial trade in opium was no more regulated than the imperial trade in tea. In fact, the export of Indian opium to China largely paid for the import of Chinese tea to Britain; the opium trade was a crucial source of revenue for the Raj—15 percent or more of its total revenue in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, second only to land revenues. Britain fought two nasty wars with China in large part to protect that trade and the revenue that came from it. For these reasons, we might well consider the Victorian British Empire as the biggest, most violent narco-empire the world has ever known.

There is now a rich literature on the British imperial opium trade throughout Asia, but Ashley Wright's Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma is the first one devoted specifically to Burma, and for that reason specialists will wish to engage with it. Her main premise is that British imperial power in Burma and in Asia more generally was tied to the production, sale, and consumption of opium in underappreciated and complex ways. She has four main points to make about this connection. The first is that opium was embedded in the Burmese labor regime. Colonial authorities no less than tin-mine owners, for instance, valued opium as a stimulant for manual workers and thus as a means of enhancing labor extraction. Wright's second point is that the control of opium in Burma was racialized in ways that generated revenue while at the same time providing a paternalistic rationale for British rule. British authorities placed legal restrictions on opium consumption among ethnic Burmese starting in the 1890s, but they never took any steps to reduce consumption within Burma's growing ethnic Chinese community. Their rationale was that the Chinese, like Assamese and Bengalis elsewhere in the Subcontinent, were conditioned by habitual use over generations to moderate opium consumption. The ethnic Burmese, in contrast, were alleged to be physically weaker and more childlike and thus in need of paternal interference for their own good. Wright's third point is that the ambiguities in colonial drug policy reflected a broader ambiguity about the purpose of colonial rule. There were several generations of paternalists within the Burmese government who perceived moral value in restrictive opium policies. But little was ever done in practice to reduce the flow of opium through Burma because it was an important source of revenue and because opium eating and smoking had become sufficiently embedded in Burmese culture that a more prohibitive set of policies might trigger social unrest. Wright's final main point is that the running debate about opium in Burma was complicated because Burma was embedded in trade networks that linked it closely with the other provinces of India, with Britain, with China, and with the rest of Asia. Thus, for instance, the suppression of opium was ultimately unthinkable in Burma because prohibition would set a moral precedent that it was deemed imprudent to pursue elsewhere.

There is plenty to like in Wright's book. Her arguments are clear and convincing. She is deeply conversant with the now very rich literature on opium and the British Empire. She provides convenient “one-stop shopping” for anybody who is curious about opium policy in British Burma. Inevitably, one has a few quibbles. First of all, like many policy studies and many books based on a dissertation, this one is a little hard to get through: one is left wanting a few more stories to add a human dimension to a fairly abstract and unfailingly careful analysis. Wright properly notes that opium was a sort of colonial encounter that was clearly inscribed on the bodies of its users and abusers. Yet one is left wishing that she had delved more deeply into the culture of opium ingestion in Burma if for no other reason than to try to better understand how the colonized and not just the colonizers thought about it. Secondly, while Wright's point that drug-policy making in Burma was embedded in a complex imperial network is well taken, one wonders whether it is a point that needs to be as heavily belabored as it is here. The idea of the “network” is now so well established in colonial studies as to be something of a truism. Certainly it was a truism for colonial officials, who always had to worry about setting local precedents that could create trouble elsewhere. When it came to opium, the most important thing was to keep the revenue flowing—especially to the Raj. That consideration, as Wright herself notes, trumped all moral ones straight through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth—even when overall demand for Indian opium rapidly constricted as it was replaced by domestic sources in the vast Chinese market. Thus any local precedent that threatened to stanch the flow of opium from the heart of India was likely to be honored only in the breach, whether in China, where the precedent was defeated by main force, or in Burma, where the precedent was carefully circumscribed to render it innocuous.