‘Black Mail’: Networks of opium and postal exchange in nineteenth-century India

Abstract

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.