From Smoke and Ashes (Amitav Ghosh, 2023) pp212-5
In 1997, on the eve of Hong Kong’s return to China, The New York Times published a curious article on its editorial page titled The Opium War’s Secret History: Some Awkward Truths for China and America’. The article, which attempts to walk a fine line between castigating China and atoning for America’s involvement in the opium trade, mentions only one trader by name, Warren Delano Jr:
The old China trader was close-mouthed about opium, as were his partners in Russell & Company. It is not clear how much F.D.R. knew about this source of his grandfather’s wealth. But the President’s recent biographer Geoffrey Ward rejects efforts by the Delano family to minimize Warren’s involvement … The family’s discomfort is understandable. We no longer believe that anything goes in the global marketplace, regardless of social consequences.
The final sentence is deeply disingenuous in that it tries to explain away the opium trade by suggesting that it occurred at a time when it was generally believed that ‘anything goes in the global marketplace, regardless of social consequences’. The Chinese certainly did not believe that profit trumped social consequences. This was precisely what Lin Zexu meant when he wrote in his (famously undelivered) letter to Queen Victoria that foreign opium traders, from their inordinate thirst after gain, are perfectly careless about the injuries they inflict upon us! And such being the case, we should like to ask what has become of that conscience which heaven has implanted in the breasts of all men?’
What Lin Zexu was trying to underline in his letter to Queen Victoria, and in his pronouncements to the business communities of Guangzhou, was that the human hunger for profit can pose a grave danger to society if it is not constrained by certain ethical limits. This idea would once have seemed self-evident, which is why societies everywhere traditionally imposed certain customary restraints on commerce and on communities of traders. But that was precisely what was changing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under the influence of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and advocates of the doctrine of Free Trade. The doctrine was radical not because it created new forms of commerce (market-oriented business ventures of many kinds long predated it); what was truly novel about it was that it invented abstract frames of reference, such as laws of the market’, that served to eliminate all the ethical guardrails that had previously constrained trade and commerce. It is one of the great ironies of history that Adam Smith, a puritanical moral philosopher, unwittingly helped to construct a spurious moral calculus that would henceforth absolve businessmen of all responsibility for their actions by invoking an allegedly higher set of determinants-the laws of the market-which overrode every consideration of humanity, ethics and justice because humans were purportedly powerless to override them.
The idea that ‘anything goes in the global marketplace’ is, therefore, specifically a product of the ideologies of Free Trade that became dominant in the West, particularly in the Anglosphere, in the wake of the European ‘Enlightenment’, and it actually represents a radical break with what human beings believed before the modern era. This is not to suggest that greed and criminality did not exist before modem times. But the ideology of Free Trade capitalism sanctioned entirely new levels of depravity in the pursuit of profit, and the demons that were engendered as a result have now so viscerally taken hold of the world that they can probably never be exorcized.
Nor is it at all the case that the idea that ‘anything goes in the global marketplace is no longer current. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have shown in their book The Big Myth, corporations and right-wing think tanks have invested enormous amounts of money in promoting free market fundamentalism (which is nothing other than a modern iteration of the doctrine of Free Trade),48 Thus, if anything, those ideas have an even firmer hold on the corporate world of today than
they did among nineteenth-century British and American merchants. This is amply evident from all that giant energy corporations have done to spread disinformation about climate change. They have shown that they are literally willing to take ‘anything goes’ to the point of creating a catastrophe for all of humanity, just as opium traders were once willing to let millions of people fall into addiction on the pretext that there existed a law of the market that dictated it.
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