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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).
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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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Ahmad perceptively notes that the opium debate in the American frontier arose because the opium habit had spread to Anglo-Americans in the 1870s. Thereafter, newspaper coverage chronicled the insidious infiltration of opium in American communities, first among members of the underworld, then respectable classes, and finally children. Drawing from an abundant medical literature, journalists warned about opium's effects on addicts, notably the loss of religious conviction, insanity, crime, and moral degeneration. As key figures in the Victorian ideology of sexual control, the journalists expressed their deep concern over the damaging impact the narcotic had on sexuality in sensational and titillating articles. To protect the purity and health of the American population, a number of western communities enacted anti-opium laws that were largely futile. Ahmad argues that this failure caused the anti-opium campaign to turn against Chinese. |
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Ahmad's slender volume has taken on a big question. She addresses an understudied aspect of the Chinese stereotype: the opium addict, drug trafficker, and corruptor of Americans. Although her book title suggests a study of the opium debate in the American West, she focuses on the non-California West and Texas. Ahmad convincingly establishes the importance of events in these areas, but by excluding other areas, she exaggerates the importance of the western opium debates in national discussions of Chinese exclusion. This produces a constricted view that provides little sense of the broader racial drama surrounding the opium debate and the Chinese question at national levels. Her analysis of how the opium debate informed and meshed with national campaigns concerning Chinese exclusion would have been more convincing if she had drawn more thoroughly on racial formations scholarship set in nineteenth-century America and the place of the Chinese question in these racialization processes. While Ahmad acknowledges the marginality of the Chinese, her decision to ignore the racist comments of some of the anti-opium elements is disconcerting, because she thereby obscures the importance of racialization in nineteenth-century Chinese American history. Because the opium debate was clearly framed first and foremost as a race issue, Ahmad should have rigorously discussed its racialized character along with the moral panic that it inspired. To her credit, however, Ahmad has provided valuable insights into the social history of opium smoking and the demonization of the Chinese as threats to American values and interests.
Najia Aarim-Heriot
State University of New York, Fredonia
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