Colonialism, consumption, and drug control in Asia

This chapter explores the recent wave of revisionist research on the consumption and control of drugs in Asia from the nineteenth century onward. Examples from China, India, and across Southeast Asia suggest that familiar Asian drug narratives were often based on colonial-era racial or nationalist stereotypes. Monolithic actors such as the “Chinese government,” “British imperialists,” “Japanese invaders,” or “Indian princes” dissolve in the complexities of period and place. Fresh research stresses the agency of Asian customers and their tastes, habits, and practices, given sophisticated local cultures of consumption. Other histories portray a tangled competitive scramble to supply Asian markets for intoxicants and psychoactive drugs, where the lines between commerce and government control constantly shifted. Research has moved beyond opium into the twentieth century, when drugs like cannabis, morphine, heroin, and cocaine map onto Asia’s changing connections with global commodity flows. Ideas about Asian drug use informed the emerging international drugs regulatory system.