Number of words: 735 Throughout the colonial era, Calcutta and Bombay defined the two opposed poles of India’s political economy Opium gave these two cities a major advantage over Madras, the oldest British settlement in India, which had once far exceeded Bombay in its commercial importance. But as Calcutta and Bombay flourished. Madras, lacking an … Read more

Number of words: 271 Today, at a time when the ‘economy’ and ‘business’ are thought to be insulated spheres that function according to their own laws, it has become customary to lionize merchants and businessmen for their shrewdness and entrepreneurialism. But the real lesson to be learnt from the commercial world of western India is … Read more

Number of words: 733 The year 1803 thus marked a critical moment in India’s colonial history in that it finally gave the British a decisive military advantage over the Marathas. Here at last was a golden opportunity to enhance the value of the Company’s Bengal monopoly by annihilating the Malwa opium industry! As instructed by … Read more

Number of words: 484 The hinterlands of Bombay were then controlled by a set of powerful Maratha principalities. These states, the most important of which had their capitals in Gwalior, Baroda, Indore and Nagpur, were founded after the region was wrested away from the Mughal Empire in the seventeenth century by the Maratha leader Shivaji … Read more

Number of words: 389 Of course, China too had acted early to ban the importation of opium, and the laws passed in 1729 were re-enacted twice more, once in the late eighteenth century and then again in the early nineteenth century. Because of these bans, the East India Company could not formally or explicitly acknowledge … Read more

Number of words: 374 The plant whose profile most closely resembles that of the opium poppy is the coca bush (Erythroxylum coca), the leaves of which can also be processed into the addictive drug cocaine. But for most of its long history coca was a grassroots psychoactive, used by indigenous populations in South America, where … Read more

Number of words: 779 Largely because of tea, China was consistently among four countries from which Britain bought its imports. The value of the goods that Britain received from China vastly exceeded what it got from most of its colonies: In 1857, for example, the computed real value of imports into the United Kingdom from … Read more

Number of words: 541 The seed from which this story begins is that of the tea bush T (Camellia sinensis), which produces most of the world’s tea. The oldest tea leaves go back 2,150 years and were found in the tomb of China’s Jia Ding Emperor. Beginning as an elite practice, tea drinking advanced quickly … Read more

Number of words: 250 The roots of India’s Chinese communities go back to the late eighteenth century, when the first Hakka migrants settled near Calcutta. Over time the community thrived; it ran several schools, temples and newspapers, and many of its members became successful professionals and entrepreneurs. Many Chinese Indians never visited China and had … Read more