Archaeologica.org

It's also how they are used , caffeine is just one aspect of the enjoyment of coffee /tea . Cloves ,nutmeg etc. were genuine spices used in cooking and that was their real appeal .
Even now , Europe has little demand for the extremely psycho active , non -addictive , non-lethal ,easily transported ,highly recommended by users , yage /ayahuascaca .
Earlier there would have been an ignorance but that's no excuse now particuarly with the general global demand .

George

tea was the #1 crop for the DEIC and England.

This was (and remains) the cover story.

The profit margin on tea was low.

The profit margin on opium was high. Very high.

It wasn't a load of tea that the colonists, dressed as Indians, dumped into Boston harbor.

I think you are confusing the Dutch East India Company with the later British East India Company Uni.

Roy.

I thought the #1 crop for both were slaves?

Not that I'm aware of Min. Though Uni seems to have found another crop of conspiracy theories I see.

Roy.

I think you are confusing the Dutch East India Company with the later British East India Company Uni.

Not so, Roy.

Granted, the corporate shell game is a big factor, and the source (by design) of considerable latitude for quibbling.

But whether the prime mover was the BEIC per se or The Crown, to which it was a functional (and probably actual) subsidiary, I've never seen the sheer scope of the narcotic-trafficking operation laid-out in print.

You're familiar enough, I assume, with the Devil's Triangle (to Africa to buy slaves, thence to the Caribbean to sell the slaves and buy rum, then to New England to sell the rum for money/credit, back to Africa . . .) -- with a profit on each leg.

Well, there was a much larger, and even more lucrative operation going on, entirely behind the scenes, involving the BEIC.

Start with the fact that silver has always been valued more highly in the Orient than in the West, making it profitable to those with the ability to garner and transport it to send it East, where it exchanged for gold at a more favorable rate. In concert with Rome's taste for extravagant oriental luxuries, this was the commercial mechanism by which it (Rome) was drained of specie, going pretty quickly from minting silver denarii to billion, then to silver-washed copper, followed by collapse. When coinage resumed, in the Eastern Rome (Constantinople), it was in gold.

Fast forward now to Britain. Which, in its coinage, presents a picture which seems, at first glance, as absurd as it is incomprehensible : from (as I recall) 1804 until Victoria, Britain minted no silver coinage at all (!). No shillings, no sixpence, no thrupence, no nothing. Throughout the Empire, silver was being garnered in trade, and in quantity, but it was all going to the Orient.

Trade in silks, tea and porcelain was not so considerable that it could have accounted for this. But trade in opium -- with silver being more profitable than gold to exchange for it -- could and did.

One consequence of the (as usual) Masonic "revolution" (coup) of 1821 in Mexico was the leasing, by the government, of the country's highly-profitable silver mining-slash-coinage operations to private owners (the only government-operated mint was at Mexico City itself).

By law, these were required to devote a percentage of their output to subsidiary coinage (four, two, one and half-reals) for domestic circulation. This was honored in the breach rather than in the observance, with the lion's share of the silver being minted as 8 reals, packed into barrels, and shipped east posthaste -- in some years, the entire production of some mints.

What changed with the change of government was not the pattern of trade, but those who profited most from it. From 1821 or so on, this was The Crown. Which, in its blind greed, coloured so far outside the perscribed lines as to sometimes send coinage dies to Mexico from England (which were intercepted by Mexican Customs and confiscated -- by law, all coinage dies had to be locally produced, using government authorised matrices). Today, the many Mexican (and for that matter, Spanish) crowns ("silver dollars") with oriental "chop marks" on them are artifacts surviving from the opium trade. It was a well-coordinated operation, global in scope.

It goes on and on . . .

Yeah! Like I said, the EIC not the DEIC.
The EIC traded opium to China to balance its books 'cos of the Chinese embargo on foreign goods, there is no evidence of the DEIC trading 'hard' drugs.
And as I am naive of course I happen to believe that your countrymen who dumped the Boston cargo were capable of identifying tea when the saw it, if only by smell!

Roy.

There was a Parliamentary inquiry into the BEIC's opium trade that might be illuminating to review.

What it was doing provoked as much popular outrage as did the fact that what the inquiry uncovered resulted in no action whatsoever.

Never appologise, never explain, eh ?

In 1893 as it turns out.

http://www.maritimeheritage.org/newtale/opium.html

http://www.amoymagic.com/OpiumWar.htm

http://www.drugpolicy.org/library/opium_india.cfm

Uni, I keep pointing out that me and RS were discussing the DEIC! There is no dispute, (not even a conspiracy theory) other than the EIC traded Opium!
Nor is there any evidence that I know of suggesting that the DEIC traded tea to the American colonies.
The biggest 'official' user of hard drugs in the US for many years were the 'patent' medicine scammers, including of course the Coca Cola group. And the DEIC was defunct by then.

Roy.

My bad

It was only a century ago that coke was an over the counter remedy for common ailments that everybody had (dental care was decidedly less then; processed food had hardly been invented):



What we call drugs today – evil! evil! – was household fare not one hundred years ago.

Minimalist wrote:I thought the #1 crop for both were slaves?

Those were the DWIC and the BWIC. Big, but not nearly as big as the DEIC.

Slaves were just another valuable merchandise.
Which the DWIC and BWIC did not 'catch' themselves! Slaves were prisoners of war from tribal wars. Loot. The spoils of war. Intra-African wars. Slaves were Africans 'caught' by other Africans, of the neigbouring tribes, and initially offered for sale to the white man (the Portuguese first). Who had not asked for that kind of merchandise. The initiative came from Africans! It was Africans that sold Africans into slavery! Not the white man! It is good to remember that! Africans had already been selling their 'brothers' into slavery for a thousand years, to the Arabs, on the east coast of Africa.
And of course the European traders were just the same: they saw a business opportunity and grabbed it. Exploited it. As did the slave owners. That's what they were all looking for after all: highly profitable business opportunities.

Understand me clearly please: the white man is faaaar from innocent of the human misery that African slavery in the New World caused.
BUT THEY DID NOT START IT AND THEY DID NOT INVENT IT!
It may not be socially acceptable to say it. But it is the simple truth. And very painful for Africans/African Americans to be reminded of. Which explains a lot to those who realise the real involvements of the various actors in this particular human drama.

One day our current humongous consumption of fossil energy will also be regarded a crime to humanity...

And, specifically in the case of the British empire, what do you think financed 200 years of colonial wars in all conceivable corners of the world, with overwhelming expeditionary forces consisting mainly of professional soldiers, not rarely foreign nationals(' regiments; like the Ghurkas still today). I.o.w. mercenaries. Neither come cheap. In fact they're fucking expensive! Beyond belief expensive! Just look at the US' national debt now! After only two measly colonial wars, and one on-going...!

Warfare is destructively expensive. Imagine having to do it for two whole centuries! With often several wars simultaneously, 10,000 miles apart. You need very, very, very deep pockets for that. Which only drug traficking on a global scale could fill.

Drugs financed empire...

And our colonies too.

After the Shogun kicked out the Portuguese missionaries, for two centuries the Dutch were the only gajin, foreigners, allowed - very limited – access to the Japanese empire. For trading purposes. Guess what was the number one foreign commodity the Shogun didn't want to do without? 'Spices'... Guess which producing countries the Dutch passed on their way from the Dutch East Indies to Japan and back. How about Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and China? They could move and sell shitloads, excuse me, shiploads of various drugs from one country to another, even to and from those with self-imposed isolation, without one gram ever being seen by the decent, upstanding, righteous Calvinist citizens back home. And if you don't see it you don't have a (moral) problem. Especially not as the profits did come back home.

By the time the ships came back home, after say 6 years in the east, they were neatly laden with china, silk, etc. Fashion stuff for an affluent society. And with a handful of trunks of gold, silver, diamonds, etc. etc. The other profits from the drug trade. Maybe also a few big bags of heroin, coke, cannabis, and other drugs, as use was accepted in society as normal behaviour.

Just like snuff, for instance! A drug the use of which is now chuckled at, but making it look a bit ridiculous (a smoke & mirrors strategy; it is in fact simple misdirection) allowed for the harder drugs in widespread use in e.g. the 17th and 18th centuries to be ignored in the fundamentalist/moralist 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Actually forgotten from the collective memory.