Opium’s Imperial Intimacies

Bibliographic Data

ID23462136
AuthorsJulia Kuehn (0000-0002-6338-721X, corresponding author)
Year2025
Pages194-210
Publication date2025-10-09
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueCommodities and Literature (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781009432344.012
OpenAlexW4415178189
ISBN9781009432344
LanguageEN
References cited20

Drug commodities , and opium in particular, infuse a range of literary texts. From the poetry of Coleridge and the confessions of Thomas de Quincey through to novels by Dickens, Conan Doyle and Wilde, the intoxicant transformed the Victorian geographical and literary imagination. This chapter begins with an overview of the manifold connections between British literature and opium, before turning to the way writers have imagined opium’s global geographies as a travelling commodity, from Northern India to the Pearl River in China. It considers representations of the two British military campaigns known as the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) both in Britain and in later historical novels by Amitav Ghosh . Global opium fictions, it suggests, illuminate the ‘imperial intimacies’ linking its domestic consumption to experiences of the violence of commodity exchange across China, India and their diasporas.

British literature · Commodity · Consumption (sociology) · Opium · Pearl · Poetry · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

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