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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]

Opium is a narcotic that the Javanese people widely consumed in the 19th century. The high level of consumption of opium by the public raises concerns because of its detrimental effects if consumed in excess. This made the government exercise control over opium by trading it, which also provided income for the Dutch East Indies government. One of the areas in the Dutch East Indies that had a high level of consumption of opium was the Residency of Surabaya. Therefore, this article analyzes how the opium trade took place in the Surabaya Residency from 1870 to 1898. During that period, the system used in the opium trade was the rental system (opium patch). In this study, the historical method consists of the stages of topic selection, heuristics, criticism, interpretation, and historiography. The results of this study indicate that the opium circulating in the Residency of Surabaya from 1870 to 1898 experienced ups and downs because it was affected by several conditions, such as the change in the distribution system to tenants and the economic crisis of the 1880s. Even so, the opium trade in the Surabaya Residency has become a lucrative business for those involved. Opium merupakan salah satu jenis narkotika yang banyak dikonsumsi masyarakat Jawa pada abad ke-19. Tingginya tingkat konsumsi opium oleh masyarakat menimbulkan kekhawatiran karena efeknya yang merugikan jika dikonsumsi secara berlebihan. Hal ini membuat pemerintah melakukan kontrol atas opium dengan memperdagangkannya, yang juga memberikan pemasukan bagi pemerintah Hindia Belanda. Salah satu daerah di Hindia Belanda yang memiliki tingkat konsumsi opium yang tinggi adalah Karesidenan Surabaya. Oleh karena itu, artikel ini menganalisis bagaimana perdagangan candu terjadi di Karesidenan Surabaya dari tahun 1870-1898. Pada masa itu, sistem yang digunakan dalam perdagangan candu adalah sistem sewa (patch candu). Dalam penelitian ini, metode sejarah terdiri dari tahapan pemilihan topik, heuristik, kritik, interpretasi, dan historiografi. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa candu yang beredar di Karesidenan Surabaya dari tahun 1870 sampai 1898 mengalami pasang surut karena dipengaruhi oleh beberapa kondisi, seperti perubahan sistem distribusi ke penyewa dan krisis ekonomi tahun 1880-an. Meski begitu, perdagangan candu di Karesidenan Surabaya menjadi bisnis yang menggiurkan bagi mereka yang terlibat

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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]

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]

After the Syrian civil war, deaths of those fleeing crisis areas have tragically become a regular news item. Not new to the world, however, such crises emerge from tensions between identity and difference as codified in international politics, whereby refugees and migrants become the Other and subject to unyielding universals, such as the law or narrow concepts of what is right. Indeed, the cultural logic of “global identities” informing the current refugee and migrant crisis seems recurrent, as exemplified in the recent cases of the Tamils from Sri Lanka and the Somalis. The cultural logic of global identity is also reflected in the popular nineteenth-century novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Twisted Lip, in which the main character disguises himself as a professional beggar to appeal to middle class values in order to incite their guilty consciences. Drawing on Ian Baucom, Marc Shell, and Jean-Joseph Goux, this article argues that the main character’s actions reflect and embody the cultural logic of the global politico-economy in late nineteenth century London. As such, Doyle’s novella illustrates the Derridean notion of hospitality by revealing that “identity and difference are mutually constitutive” (Baker 109) and offers insightful commentary on the current refugee and migrant crisis.

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.

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]

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]