|
|
|
Book Review
| Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952. Edited by TIMOTHY BROOK and BOB TADASHI WAKABAYASHI. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 444+ xiv pp. $ 60.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).
|
|
In May 1997, an international group of scholars gathered in Toronto for a groundbreaking conference on opium in East Asia jointly sponsored by the University of Toronto and York University. The organizers of the conference, Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, came up with the idea after discovering that opium was not only a topic of mutual interest, but also that it was the focus of an emerging body of scholarship, for the most part still at the dissertation level at that time. Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, edited by Brook and Wakabayashi, is a collection of seventeen of the papers presented at that extraordinarily productive conference. |
1
|
|
Traditionally, scholarship on opium, whether focusing on the (usually failed) efforts of governments to prohibit it, on the harmful effects of its abuse, or on the economic impact of its distribution and sale, has tended to treat the drug as unitary and unchanging over time. In their far-ranging introduction, however, Brook and Wakabayashi point out that opium meant different things to different people: it was, all at the same time, a medicine, a drug used for recreational purposes, a commodity handled by wholesalers and retailers, or a symbol of moral decay at the individual or even national level. Given the complexity of the opium trade in East Asia, with its political, economic, and sociocultural ramifications, Brook and Wakabayashi have chosen to center this volume around the examination of the broadly conceived concept of "opium regimes," which they define as "system[s] in which an authority declares its right to control certain practices, and develops policies and mechanisms to exercise that right within its presumed domain" (p. 4). Thus, the various opium regimes examined by the authors include not only governments, but also international organizations (most notably, the League of Nations), corporations such as the British East India Company, and public organizations such as the National Anti-Opium Association in China. |
. . . |
There are about 692 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
