On Empires of Vice

This is a study of the seemingly small decisions made by individual bureaucrats that culminated in much larger consequences—in this case, the banning of opium in British Burma, British Malaya, and French Indochina. Rather than looking at the relationship between bureaucracies and larger society, Kim offers an account of the construction of opium monopolies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were (for the most part) enormously profitable for European empires. Only in Burma was opium banned for moral reasons (termed here as “moral wreckage”). In Malaya, it occurred as a restructuring of colonial finances because administrators believed that the colony was too reliant on opium.

The larger value to the field of this work is that Kim does a great job of showing when “global” or “transnational” history does not work. This is especially interesting because the prohibition of opium seemed to be a result of global factors, especially the end of the China-India trade and the rise of the United States in Southeast Asia thanks to the war in the Philippines, but the reality is that opium was banned almost wholly due to local events.

I’m not sure that the organization is the best here. All of Part 1 seems to be a sort of extended introduction; Part 2 is the core of the text, and it looks at specific case studies in the three aforementioned colonies; and Part 3 offers a look at the way colonial policy still shapes the way Southeast Asian states respond to drug use and has a conclusion to the text. Part of me wishes that Part 2 were expanded and Part 1 shrunk, as there is a lot of important stuff here that needs to be unpacked.