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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]

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]

While establishing a framework for colonial governance in the Philippines, American policymakers had to confront the issue of opium smoking, which was especially popular among the Philippine Chinese community. In 1903, the Philippine Commission proposed a return to the Spanish-era policy of controlling the opium trade through tax farming, igniting outrage among American Protestant missionaries in the Philippines and their supporters in the United States. Their actions revived a faltering global anti-opium movement, leading to a series of international agreements and domestic restrictions on opium and other drugs. Focusing mostly on American policy in the Philippines, this paper also examines the international ramifications of a changing drug control regime. It seeks to incorporate the debate over opium policy into broader narratives of imperial ideology, international cooperation, and local responses to colonial rule, demonstrating how a variety of actors shaped the new drug-control regimes both in the Philippines and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the importance of the opium trade in Indonesia on the finances of the Dutch East India Co., or the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), from 1684 to 1796. In particular, it examines the opium trade on the Indonesian island of Java, in the capital city of Jakarta, formerly referred to as Batavia. It provides a statistical analysis of the financial accounts of the VOC during the stated time period as a means of measuring changes in the opium trade between Batavia and Bengal, India over time.

This article examines the impact of the opium trade in India during the years of British imperialism in the early nineteenth century on economic development in the country. It focuses particularly on the trading of opium cultivated in Malwa, India to Sindh, Pakistan, and considers how this ultimately integrated Sindh into the broader British imperial trading system. The author critiques arguments on the matter set forth in the book "Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium," by Amar Farooqi.

The article focuses on the study conducted by researcher A. J. Stockwell on the issues regarding the opium trade in the British Empire. Some studies were made to the development of the anti-opium movement since the 1870's. This paper also introduces the development of this humanitarian movement with the situation in the Straits Settlements until 1925. The fiscal reform in the colony was analyzed.

Attempts to give due weight to evidences on the harmlessness of opium and to distinguish between different levels of drug use according to modern criteria. China's influence on the world's understanding of the opium evil; Attempts to calculate the number of opium smokers; Frequent association of opium smoking with chronic or terminal illness; Small percentage of women opium smokers.