Horizon Information Portal

HSPLS site

eBooks/Audiobooks

Reading Program

Smoke and ashes : opium's hidden histories / Amitav Ghosh.

by Ghosh, Amitav, 1956- author.

View full image

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.

Ghosh, Amitav, 1956- -- Travel.

Opium trade -- History.

China -- Commerce -- History.

India -- Commerce -- History.

Great Britain -- Commerce -- History.

9780374602925 (hardcover) :

0374602921 (hardcover)

398 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

First American edition.

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China to redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the empire's financial survival. Following the profits further, Ghosh finds opium central to the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself. Moving deftly between horticultural history, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant has had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Horizon Information Portal 3.0

Powered by Dynix

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal