Review: The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China, by Peter Thilly

"The opium business: A history of crime and capitalism in maritime China." Business History, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Book Review: <i>The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China</i> by Peter Thilly

Asia. The opium business: A history of crime and capitalism in maritime China By Peter Thilly Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. 298. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography and Index.

:<i>The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China</i>

The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China, written by Peter Thilly

Drawing from the author's The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022), this essay explores China's history as an opium-exporting nation in the early twentieth century. For several decades, southeast coastal China served markets from San Francisco to Manila to Rangoon with illicit opium, morphine, heroin, and cocaine. The essay explains the multiple causes of these developments and argues that this history has been so poorly understood because of its uneasy place within broadly accepted metanarratives about opium, empire, and national victimization.

"The opium business: a history of crime and capitalism in maritime China." Asian Studies Review, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2