Search

Industrial effluent discharge is a major concern in developing countries like India. Opioids and alkaloids serve as raw materials for production of important pharmaceutical drugs like codeine, morphine, papaverine, thebaine, etc. Proper effluent discharge and waste management from opioids processing and similar industries is still a challenge. The present study focuses on collection, characterization and toxicity prediction of pollutants found in opioids processing industries in India. The wastewater was collected from Government Opium Alkaloid Works, Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, India. The collected effluent was subjected to physicochemical characterization, identification and quantification of different pollutants. Physicochemical tests revealed Chemical oxygen demand of 10015 mg/L, Biological oxygen demand 3870 mg/L, and Total dissolved solid (TDS) 1275 mg/L, with an pH of 9.47 having dark brown appearance accompanied by a pungent odour. Gas chromatography mass spectrometry followed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy was performed to identify the chemical composition of the effluent which revealed the presence of butanol, toluene, methyl isocyanide, 2-methylpentane, and benzeamine, N, N-dimethyl in major concentrations. Toluene is one of the hazardous pollutants found in up to 5.17% in the effluent. Prolonged exposure to toluene leads to disorders of muscles, cardiovascular effects, permanent neuropsychiatric effects, renal tubular damage, and sudden death. The toxicity of toluene was predicted by Toxicity estimation software tool. The software provided the LD50 value for oral rat as 1.77 -log10 mol/kg and for human 0.28 -log10 mol/kg. The authors propose to develop a methodology to bioremediate toluene from wastewater to prevent harmful effects on aquatic and higher living organisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article rethinks the relationship between opium and empire in twentieth-century Asia. A rich scholarship focuses on the success of anti-opium activists, whose moral crusades gave birth to today's global drug control regimes. By contrast, I center attention on the lesser-known pro-opium forces, demonstrating how "bad" actors, recognized now as apologists for a dangerous drug, were once essential stakeholders in imperial rule. This article traces the interconnected lives of actors that favored continuing the drug's legal commerce across Southeast Asia: the merchants, bankers, agents of shipping firms, insurance agencies and warehousing companies as well as employees of colonial industries and governments that sustained opium supply chains from India to British Malaya and French Indochina into the 1930s. Hardly a coherent coalition of profit-seeking actors, these pro-opium forces represented situational allies with linked fates despite diverse opinions, fragmented interests, and ambivalent positions toward their own opium-entangled practices. Understanding their dispersed nature gives scholars reason to revisit the imperial origins of global drug control, while underscoring Southeast Asia's importance for understanding global histories of drugs and international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan is home to the largest illicit drug industry in the world. The depth, influence, and impact of its narco-economy remain unparalleled. Illicit drug production has become a dominant feature of Afghanistan's landscape. The opium economy is pervasive and deeply entrenched. Afghanistan's opium economy has become the source of security rather than the state. Therefore, the degree of dependence on the opium economy has thus become unprecedented in the modern history of drug production. The dependence means any immediate attempt toward opium poppy prohibition/eradication will result in political and socioeconomic crises not only in Afghanistan but the transit states in the region as well. In context of narco-economy, this paper expostulate that the construction of security in traditional and nontraditional discourse are linear, i.e. detached from reality or suffers from moralistic constraint, and therefore, needs to be revisited in line with ground reality of Afghanistan and transit states at large. Deviating from conventional literature on drug-security nexus, the paper argues that a complete prohibition of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is by far a larger security concern than its retention. This research paper, therefore, takes a cursory examination of the security implications and challenges that may ensue as a result of a diminished production capacity of Afghanistan's opium economy either experienced through complete prohibition, eradication programs or through natural calamity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the socio-political histories of the Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860), Canadian Pacific Railway, and 1885 Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration have been studied, they have not often been interconnected. This article examines these socio-political histories at the intersection of sexual and race subject-making, alongside Canadian nation-building. I investigate Chinese coolie labour, the opium trade, and sexuality by analyzing historical records from both the British and Canadian Houses of Commons. The indexing of sodomy in the 1885 Royal Commission of Chinese Immigration: Report and Evidence illustrates the simultaneous racialization and sexualization of Chinese bachelor communities. I argue that the deeming of practices and desires as perverse was used to justify the alienation and exclusion of full citizen-subjects. In this examination of these histories of racialization, abstraction of labour, and the perverse alienation of bodies in settler colonial territory, I offer the term "perverse aliens" to nuance early Chinese migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the lives of Japanese and Korean subjects of Imperial Japan who were involved in opium production and circulation in Manchukuo. It discusses the dynamics, practices, and experiences of opium production and circulation. This paper provides a new reading of the diverse beneficiaries on the ground and of the opium industry in Manchukuo from the angles of production and circulation. Even as authorities continued to make significant revenue from the opium trade, the opium industry provided opportunities for diverse actors to profit from taking part in the state opium monopoly scheme. The interplay of these actors eroded Japanese imperial control over the new state. By dissecting the entanglement of the complex nature of the opium industry within a regional context, the paper demonstrates how the state actors were compelled to take action to combat illegal opium growing and selling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilizes material from archives in Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan as well as published Chinese sources to explore the opium trade between Tsarist Turkestan and Xinjiang from the early 1880s to 1917. It focuses on two different levels: the borderlands economy and society, and state policies towards illegal (or 'grey') markets. The main groups active in the trade were Hui/Dungan and Taranchi migrants from China, who had fled Qing territory after the repression of the great anti-Qing Muslim revolts during the 1860s and 1870s. After settling in Tsarist territory, they grew poppies and exported opium back across the border to China. This article shows how the borderland economy was influenced by the late-Qing anti-opium campaign, and especially by the First World War. During the war, the Tsarist government tried to create a state opium monopoly over the borderland economy, but this attempt was botched first by the great Central Asian revolt of 1916, and later by the 1917 revolution. Departing from the prevailing historiography on borderlands, this article shows how the international border, far from being an obstacle to the trade, was instead the main factor that made borderland opium production and trade possible. It also shows how the borderland population made a strategic use of the border-as-institution, and how local imperial administrators—in different periods and for different reasons—adapted to, fostered, or repressed this most profitable borderland economic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the overlap between British Indian networks of postal communication and trade, and smuggling of opium within a nineteenth-century inter-Asian context. These circulatory networks received support from the expansion of global shipping lines. The colonial state subsidised opium steamers of private shipping companies and converted them into mail packets, using them to transport illicit opium to parts of Southeast and East Asia. Domestically, inland postal routes came to be appropriated by local traders, cultivators and itinerants to smuggle excess opium, growing outside the purview of the colonial state, to various ports in western India, thereby cutting into the profits and prestige of the colonial state. Simultaneously, official complicity in opium smuggling also came to the fore, evident in the case of post offices situated in the eastern parts of the subcontinent, highlighting the inherent weaknesses within the colonial system of administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US missionaries Elijah Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams leveraged authority from extraterritorial printing in South China to rebut the oratorical eloquence of ex-President John Quincy Adams on the First Opium War. They did this by editing Adams's 'Lecture on the War with China' (1841) for The Chinese Repository that they published monthly from Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong. Adams presents the British as righteous Christians defending 'free trade' from pagan China. The missionaries' editorial strategies challenged Adams on points of fact to signal disagreement with him over the moral implications of opium smuggling and China's status under international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing Albert Smith's and Charley Dickens's 1858 and 1860 trips to the sites of the Second Anglo-Chinese War, the article suggests that the experience of war, especially of wars fought abroad, is characterised by affective unease and epistemological breakdowns. Smith and Dickens enact war tourism in Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai as they perform incongruous and tone-deaf cross-cultural relations in a 'theatre of war'. Similarly, contemporary novels reveal the complicated entanglements of the Sino-British (opium) relationship as writers try to make sense of a world in which cultural contact is fraught with violence and cognition is brought to its limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War is prominent in sound studies, yet the sonic dimensions of the Opium Wars remain understudied. Analysing essays on the First Opium War by the English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), this article explores the dense relationships between opium, empire and sound in nineteenth-century Britain. It brings the tropes of the pipe as connector and organ as musical instrument, body part and instrument of the body politic into dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari's theorisation of the 'Body without Organs', and suggests how the empires of China and Britain and their opium-taking subjects could be imagined as violently sounding bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Gandhi's representations of opium as indicative of the addictive nature of the colonial relationship in India. It also shows how the opium trade had an impact on Gandhi's redefinition of food. Some submissions to the 1893–94 Royal Commission on Opium in India refer to De Quincey and reading De Quincey's Confessions alongside Gandhi's Hind Swaraj and Guide to Health reveals how both authors grappled with questions of dependency and selfhood in relation to modernity. I also discuss Gandhi's representations of pleasure and opium alongside Altaf Hussain Hali's (1837–1914), whom Gandhi admired as a reformist Urdu poet. Opium and intoxicants were a site on which colonial and postcolonial agency were both imagined and compromised in Gandhi, De Quincey and Hali. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue proposes that two discrete nineteenth-century histories of opium – a literary history, initiated by the drug confessions of De Quincey, and a colonial history, exemplified by the commercial activities of the East India Company (in which Thomas Love Peacock participated) in cultivating opium in Bengal for export to China, leading to the first Opium War – are common elements in a nineteenth-century 'opium complex', a set of interlocking practices of individuals and (quasi)state actors, extending across the globe. Sherlock Holmes detective stories are read as compressed registers of tensions that inhere in this complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to examine the representation of shifting legalities in Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies within the context of emerging legal regimes in early nineteenth-century British India. I argue that the novel makes two important interventions in the corpus of research interested in intersections of colonial histories and the development of socio-legal institutions. First, through overlapping stories of numerous characters who are differentiated by multiple levels of subalternity in terms of race, class, and gender as they navigate the colonial and customary legal regimes, the novel foregrounds the interconnections between law and the colonial enterprise and moves beyond the binary categories of legal subjects under colonial rule. Second, by showing the possibility of collective agency in the liminal space of the ship, the novel contributes to the growing attentiveness of scholars to the potential for legal subjects to individually or communally intervene in the formation of alternative and less-coercive legal regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the opium trade and manufacture in British Columbia. History of the trade in the Canadian province; Opium imports and revenues in British Columbia; Opium smuggling operations; Suppression of the trade and manufacture of the substance.

This article examines a significant debate on China and the Chinese market held within the British mercantile community in the early 1830s. Occurring in the years before the East India Company's monopoly over China trade was abolished in 1834, this debate has received much less attention than the Macartney embassy and the rise of the opium trade. This article shows that, in order to suit their own economic interests, supporters of the EIC and the 'free traders' presented rival images of China and the China trade to lead the governing authorities and the wider public to understand the country and its people in a way most favourable to themselves. Compared to the earlier European accounts of China, which examined different aspects of Chinese civilisation and were at least to some degree academic, this debate within the British mercantile community was clearly aimed at influencing the country's commercial policy in China. Although neither side was genuinely interested in discovering the 'real' China, this competition in image-building was crucial to Britain's relations with China in the era leading to the First Opium War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Afghanistan as the world's leading opium producer. The author states that although Afghanistan produces ninety percent of the world's opium, the poppy cultivation trade does not seem to have translated into economic power for the nation. Topics include opium wars, political instability, the connection between war and drug production, and the dependence of the Afghan economy on drug production. The Taliban and Mujaheddin groups are mentioned.

Research on opium in colonial India has so far mainly focused on the competing Malwa and Bengal opium currents under the control of the Sindia and Holkar families and of the British East India Company, respectively. The historical trajectory has tended to emphasize the implementation of a draconian and all-encompassing British monopoly. This study joins the emerging efforts to search the regional histories on the margins of the strongest players' actions on the global scene. It aims at nuancing the narratives by focusing on a region away from such centres. The study investigates the local cultivation and usage of opium in Rangpore district—a region in north Bengal that had recently been badly affected by a severe flood. Here, the drug was extensively used and the lucrative trade with neighbouring states gave small-scale cultivators an income also under hard environmental conditions. The fact that production and trade were small-scale, fragmented, and made use of markets in Cooch Bihar, Assam, and Bhutan impeded British attempts at getting in control of production and trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro's international status is more secure than ever. The prestige of this prize, however, serves to shore up its own institutional capital, citing Ishiguro's allegedly universal humanism to do so while belying the kind of critical work that his novels actually carry out. This essay reads When We Were Orphans (2000), set between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War and focused on the opium trade in Shanghai, to show how the novel critically engages with the neocolonial conditions of its present. Read in light of Paul Gilroy's notion of "postcolonial melancholia," I argue that Ishiguro's novel intervenes in the economic abuses afforded by unregulated multinational capitalism—structures that reflect the continuing legacies of colonialism itself—and that, ultimately, the novel locates alternative future forms of international belonging from within the degradations of an exploitative colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Golden Crescent region of South Asia-comprising Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan-is a principal global site for opium production and distribution. Over the past few decades, war, terrorism, and a shifting political landscape have facilitated an active heroin trade throughout the region. Protracted conflict has exacerbated already dire socio-economic conditions and political strife within the region and contributed to a consequent rise in opiate trafficking and addiction among the region's inhabitants. The worsening epidemic of injection drug use has paralleled the rising incidence of HIV and other blood-borne infections in the region and drawn attention to the broader implications of the growing opiate trade in the Golden Crescent. The first step in addressing drug use is to recognize that it is not a character flaw but a form of mental illness, hence warranting humane treatment of drug users. It is also recommended that the governments of the Golden Crescent countries encourage substitution of opium with licit crops and raise awareness among the general public about the perils of opium use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the US Government make extensive use of remote sensing to quantify and monitor trends in Afghanistan’s illicit opium production. Cultivation figures from their independent annual surveys can vary because of systematic differences in survey methodologies relating to spectral stratification and the addition of a pixel buffer to the agricultural area. We investigated the effect of stratification and buffering on area estimates of opium poppy using SPOT5 imagery covering the main opium cultivation area of Helmand province and sample data of poppy fields interpreted from very high resolution satellite imagery. The effect of resolution was investigated by resampling the original 10 m pixels to 20, 30, and 60 m, representing the range of available imagery. The number of strata (1, 4, 8, 13, 23, 40) and sample fraction (0.2–2%) used in the estimate were also investigated. Stratification reduced the confidence interval by improving the precision of estimates. Cultivation estimates of poppy using 40 spectral strata and a sample fraction of 1.1% had a similar precision to direct expansion estimates using a 2% sample fraction. Stratified estimates were more robust to changes in sample size and distribution. The mapping of the agricultural area had a significant effect on poppy cultivation estimates in Afghanistan, where the area of total agricultural production can vary significantly between years. The findings of this research explain differences in cultivation figures of the opium monitoring programmes in Afghanistan and recommendations can be applied to improve resource monitoring in other geographic areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the paintings of the Gulzarbagh opium factory in Patna, India that depict the many tasks of opium processing in the 1850s. It examines how the labor vignettes provide insight into Indian art production of the period. It looks at the practices of the artists of these paintings including Shiva Lal. It also draws from two texts illuminating the labor processes, such as a pamphlet by W.C.B. Eatwell and a note written by doctor Robert Lyell.

The article talks about the Fujianese opium trade and focuses on the local story of Shenhu Bay and the networks created by entrepreneurs like Shik Po and John Rees.

Opium is the raw material for the production of heroin, and the characterization of opium seizures through laboratory analysis is a valuable tool for law enforcement agencies to trace clandestine opium production and trafficking. In this work, a method for opium profiling based on the relative content of five principal and 14 minor opium alkaloids was developed and validated. UPLC‐Q‐TOF was adopted in alkaloid analysis for its high selectivity and sensitivity, which facilitated the sample preparation and testing. The authentic sample set consisted of 100 “Myanmar” and 45 “Afghanistan” opium seizures; based on the data set of the 19 alkaloid variables in them, a partial least squares discriminant analysis classification model was successfully achieved. Minor alkaloids were found to be vitally important for opium profiling, although combined use of both principal and minor alkaloids resulted in the best geographical classification result. The developed method realized a simple and accurate way to differentiate opium from Myanmar and Afghanistan, which may find wide application in forensic laboratories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing diplomatic relations between the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Republic of Turkey in 1925 defined the ways of the cooperation of these two countries concerning politics, army, economy, culture and education, as well as many other areas. Signing numerous bilateral agreements that regulate the unsolved mutual questions during the second half of the 20s and at the beginning of the 30s of the last century improved mutual relations that were intensified, particularly after signing the Balkan Pact in 1934. The important segment is the cooperation regarding the economy which was significantly improved with the temporary changes in the years of the world economic crisis. Common participation in the world market of opium, which was seen through the acting of the “Turkish-Yugoslav Central Bureau of Opium” in Constantinople, was a particularly important fact. This paper, the heuristic base of which consists of archival sources, published sources, the press from that period and relevant bibliography - presents the basic characteristics of running the business of the Yugoslav-Turkish “bureau”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is divided into two sections. First section deals with the importance of opium economy with reflection of conflicts between indigenous traders and British authorities over Malwa opium. In this section, British monopoly over opium crops will also be highlighted. The second section focuses on British purposes to annex Sindh. In this section, the importance of Sindh with regard to opium trade will be dealt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past twenty-five years, the government of Myanmar (Burma) has consolidated control over large parts of Shan State, neutralizing much of the threat posed by armed groups and strengthening its hold over revenue extraction. During this period Myanmar has retained its position as the world's second largest producer of illicit opium, much of which is converted into heroin within the country's borders. This article explores the relationship between state-building processes and the illicit opium/heroin economy in Shan State since 1988. The author has four aims. First, to reassess the theoretical assumptions that equate illicit economies with state fragility and demonstrate instead why illicit drug economies can become embedded in processes of conflict reduction and state consolidation. Second, to explain why establishing control over Shan State has become so important to the Myanmar government's state-building ambitions. Third, to analyze how the state's engagement with the drug trade has become a vital part of its attempts to consolidate control, in terms of financing military expansion and brokering deals with strongmen who are able to govern local populations. Finally, to assess how these strategies embody a form of “negotiated statehood” in which the state's growing control has been defined by attempts to manage, rather than monopolize, the means of coercion and extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the process leading to the Afghan government's decision to implement a prohibition and eradication of opium in the northeastern province of Badakhshan. It explores why Daud chose Badakhshan, the impact of the opium ban on the people of Badakhshan and the future of opium production and trade, as well as the evolution of drug control in Afghanistan under the Musahiban dynasty. Ultimately, the ban was launched because it allowed Daud to garner international praise and financial support, while enforcing eradication in an area inhabited by ethnic minorities ensured that the Afghan government's coercive strategy would not generate resistance from rural Pashtun tribes historically opposed to these types of state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1900, two ex-missionaries submitted a petition to President William McKinley requesting his intervention against the opium trade in China. Their petition laid the foundation for twentieth century antidrug rhetoric by blending arguments about morality and human productivity. The petition upheld “legitimate” markets as a moral good capable of benefiting both the United States and China. This rhetoric, which conjoined economic advantage with humanitarian mission, answered two problems facing U.S. policy makers after the Spanish-American War: the charge from anti-imperialists that imperialism was fundamentally antidemocratic and anti-American and that of assuring improved trade with China, one of the principal goals of the Philippine conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the journalism work of 19th-century political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It notes Marx was editor of the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" newspaper in the 1840s and that the two men wrote many articles for the "New York Tribune" and other newspapers in the ensuing decades. It cites subjects on which the two reported, including economic conditions in the U.S., the Crimean War, and Great Britain's opium trade in China. Other topics include the impact of reporting on the U.S. economy on Marx's thought, why he did not finish his work "Das Kapital," and the role of slavery in the development of capitalism in the U.S.

Yearly estimates of illicit opium production are key metrics for assessing the effectiveness of the counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan. Poor security often prevents access to sample locations and puts pressure on field surveyors, resulting in biased sampling and errors in data recording. Supportive methods using aerial digital photography for improving yield estimates were investigated in the UK in 2004, 2005, and 2010. There were good empirical relationships between normalized difference vegetation index and poppy yield indicators (mature capsule volume and dry capsule yield) for individual fields. The results suggested a good generalized relationship across all sampled fields and years (R2 > 0.70) during the 3–4 week period including poppy flowering. Regression estimates using this relationship with the imagery counteracted bias in the sample estimate of yield, reduced sample error, and enabled the production of detailed maps showing the poppy yield distribution. The application of this approach using very-high-resolution satellite imagery was investigated in the context of the annual opium survey in Afghanistan. Initial results indicated the potential for bias correction of yield estimates using a smaller and targeted collection of ground observations as an alternative to random sampling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the foundational history of a major European mercantile house in colonial South East Asia in the context of commercial developments that had both a regional and global reach. In so doing, it seeks to relate a local and historically particular event to a broader world pattern defined by three rapidly evolving commodity chains, based respectively on the production, distribution and consumption of cotton goods, coffee and opium. In this context, the paper argues that the hard-won commercial success of the firm in question resulted from a significant degree of withdrawal from the bilateral ties between colony and metropolis inherent in the cotton and coffee commodity chains. In their place, the firm had recourse to several varieties of the inter-Asian trade, of which the opium commodity chain constituted the key dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critique is presented of the novel "River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh, focusing on the book's depiction of the opium trade between China and Great Britain in the 19th century and the commodification of nature in Chinese cities such as Canton. Postcolonial and postmodern themes in the novel, urban ecology, and the history of China's relations with western countries are also discussed.

To grasp current trends within capitalism without abandoning the framework of Marx's Capital we need to return to the category of 'fictitious capital' and make it central to our explanations. Based on the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Lecture, this essay combines reflections on Marx's account of 'fictitious capital'; an investigation of the role of bills of exchange; and an analysis of the recent turmoil in British and US banking. It looks at the way the opium trade, financed through the London bill market, integrated a constellation of interests in the City with the labour of peasant households in India as parts of a unified accumulation process. Opium was vital to the fortunes of British capitalism for most of the nineteenth century. The merchant banks that were the mainstay of Britain's form of capitalism were also the key element in the re-emergence of global finance in the postwar period. The concluding part of the paper deals with the current banking crisis and follows Hilferding in arguing that by providing liquidity to the markets for fictitious capital, speculation plays a crucial role in sustaining profitability for the bigger capitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]