Those familiar with the names of William Jardine and James Matheson are likely to know them simply and solely as the grandest drug lords of the early nineteenth century. Plenty of other Britons (and Americans, too) smuggled Indian opium into China to feed that country's voracious appetite for it. But none were bigger than Jardine and Matheson—the house that opium built. In Opium and Empire, his engrossing dual biography, Richard Grace is at pains to show that Jardine and Matheson were much more than mere narco-traffickers. They were prototypical Scotsmen on the make in the empire—Jardine a Lowlander of humble origins who worked his way from being a ship's surgeon on an East Indiaman to a merchant prince in the China trade, Matheson a well-to-do Highlander of landed origins who used his vast mercantile wealth to purchase the Isle of Lewis. Jardine was known by the Cantonese as “the iron-headed rat,” a gruff and tough-minded businessman who lived to work and habitually toiled at his desk until two in the morning. Matheson was more affable, a people person who held fast to a vision of “improvement” by which trade would be liberated from the dead hand of government interference and the peoples of the world enriched by untrammeled commerce. Jardine worked himself into a rather early grave, while Matheson lived on to pursue a second career as an “improving” Highlands laird. Together they made a formidable team, and turned Jardine, Matheson into a leviathan of wealth.

Men of widely contrasting temperaments they most decidedly were. But Grace convincingly argues that together they embodied, as early as the 1830s, the ethos of “gentlemanly capitalism” that P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins have taught us to associate with the mid- to late-Victorian decades. Not content to focus solely on opium trafficking, Jardine and Matheson maximized their profits by diversifying their assets through consulting work, discounting bills, importing textiles to China while exporting silk and tea to Britain, and maintaining their own fleet of ships in which to carry passengers as well as goods. Champions of the free-trade service sector, they ultimately returned home from Canton to set up as city bankers, Scottish estate owners, members of Parliament, and Pall Mall club members. Not the least of the strengths of Grace's engagingly written account is that it immerses the reader in the remarkably broad-ranging business of these vigorous men of affairs.

Grace's professed aim as an even-handed biographer is to rescue his subjects from the enormous condescension of posterity. Far from being bloody-minded drug kingpins, these gentlemanly capitalists were indeed gentlemen. They topped many a list of charitable subscriptions not only in England and Scotland but also in China. Their business associates—Parsi and Chinese as well as English, Scottish, and American—admired not only their shrewdness but also their scrupulosity. It is quite true that they encouraged the Whig government of the late 1830s to get tough with China after the Celestial Empire banned opium imports. But Grace argues that the first Opium War was hardly orchestrated by Jardine and Matheson. Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office needed no convincing to try to force open Chinese markets, as he perceived free trade (in opium as in everything else) was a good in its own right. As for the opium trade itself, Jardine and Matheson truly believed, as did their many rivals, that they bore no responsibility for China's growing addiction problem. It was up to the purchaser to moderate his opium smoking; if he overdid it, this was no fault of the seller's.

A great many Britons of Jardine's and Matheson's generation readily agreed with their reasoning about opium. Alcohol was no less widely abused in Europe and America than opium was in China, it was commonly argued, but no western government sought to forbid its consumption. Far from upholding the emperor's ban, opium apologists insisted, many mandarins actively trafficked in it themselves; Qing corruption was to blame as much or more than any other factor in the opium flood. Opium could indeed become addictive, apologists conceded, but in the age before aspirin it was the most effective painkiller known to medicine, and for this reason it was as widely swallowed in pill form in the West as it was smoked in the East. One can concede all these points and still conclude that in his effort to polish Jardine's and Matheson's tarnished reputations, Grace lets his subjects off a bit too easily. Matheson was a particularly avid propagandist for the use of British arms to force opium on the Chinese. His mid-1830s pamphleteering bristled with a bellicose contempt for Chinese authority (and to some extent for the Chinese people more broadly) that makes for wincing reading today. It is indeed a gross distortion to say that Jardine and Matheson cajoled the Whig government into going to war with China in 1839. But it is no exaggeration to call them warmongers, and Grace's account has very little to say about the first Opium War itself. Recent scholarship has made clear that this was a sordid affair, full of hostage-taking, reprisal killings, and systematic pillage. The war was a most ungentlemanly way to force the Qing Empire to legalize the opium trade. For this reason, Jardine and Matheson were perhaps not quite as simon-pure as Grace suggests, even though he is clearly right to conclude that they were much more upstanding characters than the drug-lord stereotype would concede to them.