The document discusses the role of opium in strengthening the British Empire's control over India during the 18th century. It describes how the British East India Company began cultivating opium in India and trading it with China to solve their trade imbalance problem. The opium trade grew dramatically over the century. The revenues from opium helped the British East India Company establish control over Bengal and other key territories in India through military victories. By the late 18th century, opium had become the world's most valuable commodity and helped make the British East India Company one of the largest companies, strengthening the British Empire's power in the region.

1. The role of Opium in
18th Century’s British
Empire.
Guillermo Pineda

2. Essay
Question: What role did the production and
commerce of opium played during the 18th
century to strengthen the British Empire's
control over India?
Subject: Opium
Theme: The role that opium played during the
18th Century to strengthen the power of the
British Empire in India.

3. 17th Century trade
China opened to foreign trade under the Qing
Dynasty via Guangzhou (Canton).
By 1690s, traders from the British East India
Company began shipping Tea to supply British
demand!
Chinese were only interested in silver and not in
British commodities.
WHAT TO DO?

5. British traders’ solution
Opium became THE high-value commodity for which
China was not self sufficient.
The British traders had been purchasing small amounts of
opium from India for trade since Ralph Fitch first visited in
the mid-sixteenth century.1
Trade in opium was standardized, with production of balls
of raw opium, 1.1 to 1.6 kilograms, 30% water content,
wrapped in poppy leaves and petals, shipped in chests of
60-65 kilograms.1 Chests of opium were sold in auctions in
Calcutta with the understanding that the independent
purchasers would then smuggle it into China.
1. Carl A. Trocki (2002). Opium as a commodity and the Chinese drug plague.

6. What happened?
1760s:1,000 chests of opium (each weighing 63.64 Kg.) were
smuggled into China
1800s: gradually increased to 4,000 chests.
1824: increase dramatically to over12,000 chests.
1830: rising to 19,000 chests.
1835: 30,000 chests.
1838: 40,000 chests (2,500 tons of opium) in 1838.(2)
The British encouraged poppy growing. By the end of the 1830s (less
than a century later) the opium trade was already, and was to remain,
"the world's most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth
century.” (3)
(2) Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800-1842 (Monthly Review Press; Cambridge University Press 1951) p.
232.
(3) Frederic Wakeman, "The Canton Trade and the Opium War” p. 172. cited in John K. Fairbanks. The Creation of the Treaty System.
The Cambridge History of China vol. 10 Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 213.

7. Opium Trade
45000
40000
40000
35000
30000
30000
25000
20000 19000 Opium Trade
15000 12000
10000
5000 4000
1000
0
1760 1800 1824 1830 1835 1838
• A chest of opium was worth nearly $1,000 in 1800.
• In 1980, 2,000 tons of opium supplied all legal and illegal uses. By 2002, the
opium production was 5,000.
• In 2002 the price for one kilogram of opium was $300 for the farmer, $800 for
purchasers in Afghanistan, and $16,000 on the streets of Europe before

8. Bellin, J.N. Old Antique map of the Gulf of Bengal] Carte du Golphe de
Bengale. Amsterdam, c. 1760. http://www.antiquemaps-

10. 1st they needed to control Awadh
and the territories to the
Southeast
Awadh was known as the granary of India and was
important strategically for the control of the Doab, the
fertile plain between the Ganges and the Yamuna
rivers.
It was a wealthy kingdom, able to maintain its
independence against threats from the Marathas, the
British and the Afghans.
Ruled by the Nawabs who were a Persian Shia Muslim
dynasty from Nishapur.

12. British Action I - 1757 Battle of
Plassey
Allies: British Army leaded by Lord Robert Clive (Clive of
India) + Mir Jafar (Became the Nawab of Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa)
Against: Siraj ud-Daulah, the last independent Nawab of
Bengal Subah and the French East India Company
Effect: Company rule over South Asia which expanded over
much of the Indies.
The battle took place at Palashi, Bengal (Plassey is the
anglicised version of Palashi), on the river banks of the
Bhagirathi River, about 150 km north of Calcutta, near
Murshidabad, then capital of undivided Bengal.
950 British soldiers + 2,100 indian sepoy; against 35,000
Indian infantries, 18,000 cavalry men and 50 French
artillerymen

13. Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757, by Francis Hayman. National Portrait G
London.

14. British Action II - 1764 Battle of
Buxar
7,000 soldiers under the command of the British East
India Company (857 British, 5,297 Indian sepoys and
918 Indian cavalry) against 40,000 combined armies of
Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal; Shuja-ud-Daula
Nawab of Awadh; and Shah Alam II, the Mughal
Emperor.4
The battle was a decisive victory for the British East
India Company that got the control for the Company to
collect and manage the revenues of almost
100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) (Modern: West
Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and
part of Bangladesh)
4Ness and Stahl. Western Imperialist Armies in Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and
History.

16. Afterwards,
The British East India Company gained the power to act as
diwan of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. This allowed the
company to pursue a monopoly on opium production and
export in India, to encourage riots to cultivate the cash
crops of indigo and opium with cash advances, and to
prohibit the "hoarding" of rice.
This strategy led to the increase of the land tax to 50% of
the value of crops, the starvation of ten million people in
the Bengal famine of 1770, and the doubling of East India
Company profits by 1777.
Beginning in 1773 the British government began enacting
oversight of the company's operations, culminating in the
establishment of British India in response to the Indian

17. Bengal opium was highly prized, commanding twice the
price of the domestic Chinese product, which was
regarded as inferior in quality.
By the end of the 18th Century , the East India Company
would become one of the largest companies in the
world, with a private navy, army and civil service larger
than that of some small countries.
In due course its import duties supplied 10% of Britain’s
national income.
Apart from Opium they traded cloth from India, tea from
China and then from its own plantations in India.
By 1765, under the leadership of John Calland they had
already 17,000 troops in Bengal. 50years later the
Company's armies in India consisted of a quarter of a
million men, although the vast majority were sepoy.

19. Global Effects in the 18 th
Century
18th century expansion was also happening across the
Atlantic.
The rising demand of tea pushed for a higher demand of
sugar + sugar required plantations + which required slave
labour.
Tea imports carried by the East India Company rose from 9
million lbs. in the 1720s to 37 million by the 1750s.
In 1700 the British imported 23,000 tons of sugar. By 1800
the import level was 245,000 tons, much of which went into
tea.
So, the demand from the Carribean plantations was clearly
sufficient to generate its own slave-trading companies and
sell opium to China in order to reduce its deficit.

20. Global Effects in the 18 th
Century by the end of the
Opium stopped being a British business
18th Century.
Competition came from the United States, which began to
compete in Guangzhou (Canton) selling Turkish opium in the
1820s.
Portuguese traders also brought opium from the independent
Malwa states of western India, although by 1820 the British
were able to restrict this trade by charging "pass duty" on the
opium when it was forced to pass through Bombay to reach an
entrepot.
Despite drastic penalties and continued prohibition of opium
until 1860, opium importation rose steadily from 200 chests per
year under Yongzheng to 1,000 under Qianlong, 4,000 under
Jiaqing, and 30,000 under Daoguang. The illegal sale of opium
became one of the world's most valuable single commodity
trades, and has been called "the most long continued and

22. By the 19th Century
In response to the ever-growing number of Chinese
people becoming addicted to opium, Daoguang of
the Qing Dynasty took strong action to halt the
import of opium.
In 1838 the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu
destroyed 20,000 chests of opium in Guangzhou
(Canton).
The British, who were not willing to replace the
cheap opium with costly silver, began the First
Opium War in 1840, winning Hong Kong and trade
concessions in the first of a series of Unequal
Treaties.

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