| Popis: |
Opium is central in the history of nineteenth- to early twentieth-century late imperial and modern China. Opium’s shift from herbal medicine into a larger narco-economy helped shape China’s foreign relations and economic life, affecting Chinese culture and the long struggle for modern China. This chapter puts together researched social history issues of who smoked opium, when, and why. By considering opium as a consumer item, historians “decriminalize” and depoliticize thinking about the drug and its consumption. Opium, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, began to appeal to millions of consumers from different regions and backgrounds as they indigenized, integrated, enhanced, and reinvented opium smoking as something Chinese. The demand for drugs’ rising consumption drove its rising trade, foreign conflicts, prohibition, and modern state “opium regimes.” Drug consumer culture offers a window on how a commodity and its consumption impacted the course of Chinese history. |
