The Myth of the 'Opium War'.

• Author: Dikotter, Frank

STEPHEN R. PLATT believes that the so-called Opium War of 1839-1842 was one of the most "shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history." The central question, he writes in Imperial Twilight, is a moral one: How could Britain--a country that had just abolished slavery--so hypocritically turn around and push drugs onto "a defenceless China"?

Platt, a University of Massachusetts Amherst historian, thus joins a long list of writers who have portrayed the Opium War as one of the worst crimes of the modern era. Karl Marx, for one, believed that the slave trade was merciful compared to the opium trade. Forty years ago, John King Fairbank, doyen of modern Chinese studies, called the opium trade "the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times."

If this were so, one wonders why the production, trade, and use of opium were entirely legal in such places as Turkey, Egypt, Persia, and India for decades both before and after the Opium War. One wonders why the drug's cultivation spread in the second half of the nineteenth century to the Netherlands, France, Italy, and the Balkans. One also wonders why, as Virginia Berridge revealed in her pioneering 1981 book Opium for the People, up to 100 tons of the substance was imported every year into England, where it was readily available until the end of the 19th century, commonly administered even to children in the form of laudanum.

The author claims that opium was recreational in China but medicinal elsewhere. But this is a dubious distinction, one not even made in Britain--a country where, before 1900, alcohol, tobacco, and opium were all viewed as both palliatives and stimulants. In the absence of modern medicine, all too often pleasure meant absence of pain, especially in a poor and largely agrarian country such as China. Opium allowed ordinary people to relieve the symptoms of such endemic diseases as dysentery, cholera, and malaria and to cope with pain, fatigue, hunger, and cold.

And the vast majority of opium users in China were not the desperate addicts portrayed by proponents of prohibition. They were occasional, intermittent, light, and moderate users--a far cry from Thomas De Quincey, an English writer who famously ingested truly gargantuan quantities of the substance. Platt quotes De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at length to invoke the horrors of addiction, but surely he realizes that De Quincey was one of the 19th century's most eccentric...