Reviewed by Najia Aarim-Heriot | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.2

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Reviewed by Najia Aarim-Heriot | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West. By Diana L. Ahmad. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007. xiii + 132 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth).

In 1881, one year before the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act, a reporter for a Montana paper visited three opium dens in the local Chinatown. Like many of his colleagues, this journalist hoped to expose the rise of opium smoking among Americans. Tracing America's opium problem to the Chinese, western journalists and other self-appointed moral guardians helped fan a panic around the need to stop Chinese immigration in order to eradicate the narcotic. This connection between the crisis of opium addiction and the demand for Chinese exclusion forms the central theme of Diana Ahmad's, The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West. Using a variety of documentary materials, Ahmad, an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–Rolla, has expanded our knowledge of Chinese American experiences in the nineteenth century by fitting together pieces of the American western campaigns against opium to demonstrate clearly that the Chinese and their "caves of oblivion" (p. 16) were viewed as threats to the moral fiber of the entire United States.

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