Book Review

Asia

Edward R. Slack, Jr. Opium, State, and Society: China's Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924–1937. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 240. Cloth $59.00, paper $29.95.

The impact of opium on China is a dramatic topic that has received a good deal of scrutiny from historians over the last 150 years. But much of this research has focused in the realms of diplomatic history (and to some extent economic history), and it has been strongly colored by the moral stances toward addiction held by the investigators and by nationalist and anti-imperialist points of view. Only over the last decade has a wider set of approaches within political and social history to the problem of opium in China emerged, drawing on a rich range of newly available archival resources. The new book edited by Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi marks a major breakthrough in the study of opium as a theme in Chinese history between the 1830s and the 1950s and contributes an essential foundation on which all future studies will be able to build.	1
In their cogent introduction, which admirably sets the nonpolemical tone of this collection of seventeen essays, the editors explain that they use the term "opium regimes" to incorporate a range of organizations such as the East India Company, provincial Chinese anti-opium elite groups, the League of Nations, the National Anti-Opium Association active in China between 1914 and 1937, and the Japanese army in Manchuria. The concept of "regimes," the editors emphasize, allows them to "highlight the systematic and comprehensive character of drug-control structures and to stress their capacity for operating in the political realm and their awareness that it was necessary to do so" (pp. 4–5).	2
Perhaps unusually in the case of such edited volumes, each of the seventeen essays makes a significant contribution to the historiography of the topic. In the opening essay, Gregory Blue points out that "the long nineteenth-century opium trade can be seen as a multinational, collaborative institution that bound Indian peasants, British and Indian governments, a vast mass of Chinese consumers, and an array of Western, Parsee, Sephardic, and most of all Chinese merchants together in an immense revenue-generating system" (p. 45), and some version of this broad approach to opium is attempted by all of the other contributors. As a result, every one of these essays meshes with other areas of research that are currently giving much energy and liveliness to the field of modern Chinese history. For example, Wakabayashi's essay on the perceptions of the opium trade in China as seen through nineteenth-century Japanese eyes flows naturally into the stream of recent studies of Japanese "Orientalism" in its various guises; the essays by Carl A. Trocki and David Bello provide new pieces to the puzzle of China's relationships with its peripheries in the later Qing and early Republican period; Alexander Des Forges's analysis of the urban economics of opium consumption in Shanghai fits seamlessly with the numerous studies of civil society in its various Shanghai guises that have recently been appearing. Joyce A. Madancy's essay on "Poppies, Patriotism, and the Public Sphere" is especially vivid in showing the extraordinary intrusive power into people's homes and daily lives exercised by nonbureaucratic Fujian elites in their moralistic assaults against opium. Her analysis perfectly complements the broader considerations of nationalism in the same province just published by Ryan Dunch in Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (2001). Other essays intersect either with recently published analyses of Shanghai's criminal and police structures, or with new studies of the Japanese collaborationist regimes in the 1930s and the early 1940s, once virtually a taboo topic.	. . .