Opium's Imperial Intimacies

Reading Charles Wirgman's war correspondence in the Illustrated London News

Dados Bibliográficos

ID21700502
AutoresFariha Shaikh (University of Birmingham, autor correspondente)
Ano2026
Páginas1-19
Data de publicação2026-06-25
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoInterventions (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369801x.2026.2681422
OpenAlexW7165893474
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas25

This essay traces the literary and cultural registrations of a commodity which was the key to the capitalist expansion of Britain's imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century: opium. Grown in the plantations of Northern India, opium was packed and shipped down the River Ganges to Kolkata. From there, it was smuggled via ship, up through the Pearl River and into China. Opium transformed the Victorian geographical and literary imagination. Unlike recent studies that have focused on the “empire inside” imperial texts or the “fugitive meaning” of colonial commodities in Victorian fiction, opium's distinctiveness lay in the open violence of the commodity exchange. For example, in 1860, on the eve of the Second Opium War, the Illustrated London News bemoaned the fact that Britain's “former belligerent encounters with the Chinese did not rise in the imaginations of Englishmen at home” and promised their readers that their coverage for the coming war would enlighten them to the “dignity of war”. This essay will explore the ways in which one of the leading nineteenth-century periodicals of the day, the Illustrated London News, and the work of its special correspondent who covered the Second Opium War, Charles Wirgman, was crucial in both celebrating and condemning the imperial violence that pushed forward Britain's policy of free trade expansionism. Coverage of the war, however, was accompanied by a public fascination for the details around opium production: the essay will also pay specific attention to the racialized discourses in the press of opium consumption and production.

First world war · Period (music) · Reading (process) · Style (visual arts) · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Medical History and Innovations · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

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