From Anatolia to Indonesia: Opium Trade and the Dutch Community of Izmir, 1820-1940

Abstract

This book is the first monograph dealing with the opium trade undertaken by Dutchmen from Anatolia in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. The trade began to flower from the 1820s onwards when the Dutch government decided to commission the newly founded Dutch Trading Company with the exclusive sale of the drug on the East Indian market. Because of the large and growing consumption in the Indies, Holland became one of the biggest drug dealers that has ever existed. Despite international criticism of the opium trade and free opium consumption, Holland continued to buy opium from Turkey and allow the consumption of the drug in the Indies until 1942, when the occupation of Indonesia by the Japanese army made this impossible. Although studies have been dedicated to the opium consumption in Indonesia and the Dutch colonial drug policy, the commercial aspect of the purchase and transport to the Indies has been almost completely neglected. The archives of the Trading Company and the Colonial Ministry, on which this study is mainly based, afford us a detailed insight into the trade as well as into the connected subjects of Dutch-Ottoman (Turkish) shipping and trade as well of the history of the Dutch colony of Izmir. The files found in these collections and dealing with the purchase and transport of the drug have seldom or never been studied before.