From Smoke and Ashes (Amitav Ghosh, 2023) pp198-202
The timescale over which the impacts of opium money were felt is illustrative of the workings of processes that are the exact inverse of the forms of discrimination that have locked many African Americans, Native Americans and working-class white Americans into patterns of structural, intergenerational poverty. The advantages of race, family, class and education that the Canton graduates enjoyed created the mirrored opposite of those processes, reinforcing patterns of structural, intergenerational wealth and privilege. And contrary to ‘free market’ mythologies, those fortunes were made possible ultimately by the structures of kinship, class and race that allowed the Canton graduates to monopolize the American share of the nineteenth-century opium trade.
The fact that the Canton graduates were largely successful in evading the stigma associated with opium peddling was also due to class and race. The idea that their activities were overlooked because ‘mores were different then’ in regard to drug dealing is completely unfounded. If anything, the social stigma on drug dealing was even more powerful then than it is now? The stigma, and the silences it created, persisted over generations. Phyllis Forbes Kerr, great-great-great-granddaughter of Robert Bennet Forbes and editor of his papers, has spoken of dinners at the Forbes mansion in Milton, Massachusetts, when her uncles would tease her grandmother. We would sit at the table and she would say something about Forbes and they would say, “Oh, you mean the drug dealer,” and she would get really mad.
What was truly different then was that it was not considered untoward for white men to inflict incalculable harm on other peoples, especially if it was done in faraway places. In a country where Native Americans were being dispossessed and slain en masse, and where millions of enslaved black people were toiling on plantations, selling opium to the distant Chinese probably did not appear particularly reprehensible.
The Canton graduates were protected also by the prevalent belief that a group of upper-crust white men from some of the nation’s oldest Protestant families, men who had become titans of industry and pillars of their communities, simply could not have done anything blameworthy. These dynamics of race and class have not, by any means, ceased to operate even in twenty-first-century America. They resurfaced during the opioid epidemic, when the top executives of Purdue Pharma were often afforded preferential treatment by the legal system, merely because they were able to present themselves as respectable white businessmen who were temperamentally incapable of committing the kinds of crimes that could land a person in prison. And so, in 2019, the Mexican drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman was sentenced to life in prison by a United States court, and was made to forfeit 12 billion dollars, while the managers of Purdue Pharma, despite being given three felony convictions, did not go to jail, and the Sacklers retained possession of most of their fortune. It also worked in favour of the Canton graduates that addiction was considered a moral failing, associated with people who were inherently weak-natured and naturally disposed to vice. These assumptions too remain powerfully embedded in contemporary American culture: the makers of prescription opioids took advantage of them by consistently presenting opioid addicts as people who were congenitally weak, incapable of self-restraint and prone to addiction.” The fact that these insinuations did not ultimately find general acceptance in today’s America was probably due to the fact that the victims, in this case, were mainly white.
Although the story of the Canton graduates is unknown to most Americans, it is not a secret to the descendants of the great American opium magnates. When I was on book tours in the United States for the novels of the Ibis Trilogy, I often found that audiences in the West and Midwest would respond with surprise, and even shock, when I mentioned the names of the American institutions and families that benefited from the opium trade. However, this never happened in Massachusetts; there, audiences would, instead, nod and smile in wry agreement. Sometimes people would come up to me afterwards to say that they were related to the families I had mentioned; some even pointed me to the sources that I have used in writing this chapter.
One striking feature of the lives of the Canton graduates was that on their return to the United States they became the very souls of probity, ‘almost distressingly genteel’ in their ways? Many, if not most, of them were demonstratively religious, and some were extremely generous in building and funding churches. Abbot Low, for instance, helped his family establish the still flourishing First Unitarian Church on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn, New York.
In their business practices too, far from being swashbuckling entrepreneurs, the Canton graduates were cautious to a fault: they bore not the slightest resemblance to the caricatures of the grasping pirates of the Gilded Age’?” John Murray Forbes, for instance, was rigorously ethical in the management of his railroads, refusing ‘to tolerate the slightest suggestion of stock watering. Yet, as Downs notes, ‘in their youthful days at Canton, these paragons of railroad virtue had, to the man, been opium traders’ .
The Canton graduates yearning to be good citizens, and good Christians, is so patently evident that it is impossible not to ask how they reconciled their criminal dealings with their consciences. To be sure, this question could be asked of everyone who was dealing in drugs in Guangzhou at the time, but it is particularly pertinent in relation to the Yankee merchants for two reasons. First, many of the Americans insistently harped on the subject of conscience:
Went to Church yesterday,’ wrote Robert B. Forbes in 1839 as the opium crisis was intensifying, ‘& heard an exhilarating sermon from Mr Dickinson on the subject of conscience—I am glad that we have decent preaching here for nothing carries one home more than to meet in church & if we had not good preaching I should not go.'”l And second, in 1844 the United States signed an ‘unequal treaty’ with the Qing state that explicitly banned the opium trade while giving American missionaries the right to build churches and hospitals in China.82 (The American treaty differed from the one signed with the British in that the latter made no mention of churches and was silent on the opium issue-because the British government’s strategy was to pressurize the Chinese into legalizing opium of their own accord.)
This American insistence on the religious clauses shows that, more than any other foreign community, they were possessed with great missionary zeal. Yet, soon after 1844 the majority of American firms, led by Russell & Co., went back to trading in opium. There was, however, one very important exception: it so happened that the American community in Guangzhou also included a firm that was consistently and vocally opposed to opium smuggling. This was Olyphant & Co., a New York-based firm that prospered in the China trade even though it never dealt in opium. Founded by devout Christians, Olyphant & Co. was also a kinship group, its partners connected mainly through their wives. They were great benefactors to missionaries, financing their travel and stay in China. They never missed an opportunity to remind their fellow Americans of the indefensibility of opium smuggling.
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