Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, advances a strong claim about botanical agency. That claim is this: the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) should be considered a “historical force in its own right,” a kind of floral nation-state with diplomats stationed in every port. This poppy consortium acts on humans through a cocktail of chemical compounds like thebaine and morphine, which, when modified into narcotic drugs like heroin, transform this domesticated plant into a controlling, abusive partner that doles out as much pain as it alleviates.
Unlike other representations of the drug trade—a subject that recent media coverage of the “opioid epidemic” has retread at great length, and with no little sensationalism—this book barely touches on the vicissitudes of addiction. Ghosh instead supplies a historical antecedent to modern narratives of substance abuse. The poppy, he believes, is not just history’s substrate but one of its makers: an organism endowed with the “distinctive ability to interact with human societies in ways that can shape history.”
By Ghosh’s lights, most of these interactions have been horrific. Smoke and Ashes welds a sturdy link between opium production and Western imperialism, implicating the poppy in both past and present scenes of commercial exploitation, racial hierarchy, and territorial conquest. That an innocent flower should have its mugshot up by Queen Victoria and the Kurtz of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the book’s seemingly ironic premise. But such a premise is only ironic if one believes nonhuman beings are incapable of autonomous action, an inertness Ghosh roundly rejects, arguing for a “conceptual shift” away from human exceptionalism, from presuming that objects are “mute” and that plants have no whims or desires of their own. He portrays the poppy as an “intelligence at work” behind the scenes of Western Empire, acting to loosen the bolts that hold both individual lives and whole civilizations together.
Let us take Ghosh at his word when he says that history is not just human beings doing indubitably human things to each other. Critics loosely affiliated with the “environmental humanities” have been lodging similar claims for at least the past thirty years: plants don’t just compose the environment, they modify it; animals are more than mindless machines; objects move and mutate, and not always at our bidding. Underpinning this suite of claims is the environmental humanist’s threshold belief that “nature” separated from humanity is a moribund concept. William Cronon administered last rites. Donna Haraway gave the eulogy.
The environmental thinkers of today have been trained to be leery of pastoralism—the attempted rescue, that is, of nature from its theoretical murder—and yet their work still often seeks to reanimate humanity’s connections to the nonhuman world by bringing nature’s orphaned offspring back into the fold of something not quite natural, but not quite human either. These posthumanist visions often take the form of a network, and as the philosopher Bruno Latour writes, “there is nothing but networks, there is nothing in between them.” Writers like Ghosh perceive the world as an infinitude of nodes and fibers, interactive webs that humans, animals, plants, bacteria, consumer goods, celestial bodies, software and hardware, food, chemicals, and detritus generate from their amongness. Against the existential loneliness of the Anthropocene, the literary practitioners of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT)—people like Richard Powers, Merlin Sheldrake, and Sy Montgomery—propose a paradigm of hyperconnection, of entangling systems spreading laterally across earthly plateaus of relation.
Ghosh’s account of the opium poppy’s own web of relations begins locally, in the author’s Calcutta study. Curiously enough, it begins with a moment of Sino-speculation. The author is musing on China; or rather, he is thinking about how little he has thought of China despite the profusion of China-coded objects in his Indian home office. Several material networks converge in this scene: “I looked around that room and suddenly I could see China everywhere: in a jar of peanuts (which are known in Bengali as ‘Chinese nuts’ or ‘chinébadam’); in chrysanthemums in a vase; in goldfish in a bowl; in envelopes and incense sticks.” While European philosophy and literature had fashioned a figurative home for Ghosh’s mind, Chinese things had filled his literal house, stuffing its corners with trinkets and comestibles. Ghosh describes all this Chinese stuff as “the material, silent equivalent of words spoken by invisible, spectral forces.” By devoting his attention to the poppy—not exactly a Chinese thing, but a plant with undertones of the East—Ghosh hopes to finally hear what this material plane is saying.
If matter does speak, I assume its birth tongue would be Mandarin. Western writers from Ezra Pound to Roland Barthes have identified Eastern religion, art, and writing with materiality as opposed to transcendence. Meanwhile, China’s economic status as a manufacturing powerhouse and as the hub for various supply chains has cemented the PRC’s twenty-first-century preeminence on the global stage, which is to say that Chinese identity and Chinese power are overdetermined as material phenomena. The country’s geopolitical presence unfolds in a torrent of made in china labels, in the mycelial extensions of its “Belt and Road” initiative, and more recently, in the back-and-forth trade war of reciprocal tariffs it has waged with the United States. When the Supreme Court ruled in February against some of Trump’s tariffs, one of the now invalidated duties was a 10 percent “fentanyl emergency” tax on Chinese imports. In rhetoric, if not always in practice, American lawmakers understand our material dependency on China as an insidious addiction to be kicked.
In contrast to such punditry, ANT’s default posture is supposed to be one of stoical empiricism. Network theorists do not say which networks are bad or good; they merely identify a network’s elements, enumerate these elements’ interconnections, and then track a network’s movement through time and space. To follow certain networks, however, is to find oneself face to face with interspecies interactions that demand more than rote description. Ghosh, to his credit, cannot abstain from passing judgment on the poppy network’s negative impacts:
In effect, like a mutated pathogen, [opium] found “virgin soil” in Southeast Asia and China, and was, therefore, able to expand its circulation with unprecedented rapidity, much like the epidemic diseases that were then decimating the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Just as the spread of deadly pathogens was often aided by European colonizers in the Americas, so too was the proliferation in the circulation of opium in Southeast Asia and China actively abetted by European empires.
Passages like this one support Ghosh’s paranoiac vision of a sovereign, nonhuman entity corroding human societies by reinforcing existing pathologies of racism and greed. Reading Smoke and Ashes is like watching a fluorescent dye test proceed in real time, as the poppy’s chemical agents seep across institutional and geographic boundaries, lighting up a tumorous complex of ailing governments, impoverished tenant farmers, the ethically dubious middlemen who served as lookouts for colonialism’s depredations, and floating fleets of white narcos anchored outside Canton harbor.
In short, an imperium of the poppy.
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Smoke and Ashes is an ambitious project, quest-like in its structure and dilated in its focus. The book operates at a macro-scale—the scale of empires and centuries—and Ghosh writes comparatively little about the millions of individual addicts who have felt the poppy’s “historical force,” its high, in their bodies. Luckily, such stories are also not hard to come by. One can read Thomas De Quincey’s irreverent testimony to the “divine luxury” of using opium, or Cheryl Strayed’s grief-stricken reflections on falling in thrall to heroin: “When I think of heroin now, it is like remembering a person I met and loved intensely.”
In an essay for Artforum, the photographer Nan Goldin also personifies her poppy-derivative of choice, OxyContin, as the “cleanest drug I’d ever met.” Goldin’s phrasing confers a superlative clarity and liveness to the drug, like Oxy was a well-groomed acquaintance she met on the gallery circuit rather than a little white pill she took and took and took. This chemical custodian reorganized Goldin’s life from within, limiting her activities to “counting and recounting, crushing and snorting,” a repetitive routine she documented in grainy images of her Oxy-dusted bedspread in Berlin, her apartment floor in New York littered with blister packs and pill cases. Following an accidental fentanyl overdose, Goldin entered rehab and later founded an activist group called PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). She discovered retributive purpose in taking on the Sacklers, whose family firm Purdue Pharma had aggressively marketed OxyContin to the American public through a network of unscrupulous doctors. PAIN’s efforts helped turn the Sackler name into a toxic asset within the art world. Now, the surname requires little introduction. You know who they are: they are drug dealers.
In 2018, during a direct action at what was then called the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, PAIN activists threw amber pill bottles into a reflecting pool at the Temple of Dendur while chanting “temple of death, temple of money, temple of greed, temple of Oxy.” They staged a die-in and distributed fliers to curious tourists. A year later, the Met announced it was no longer accepting money from the Sacklers, and two years after that, the museum scrubbed the family’s name from seven of its galleries. In a press release, the Met’s then president thanked the Sacklers for the “gracious gesture” of allowing their own erasure to take place.
Of note here is the fact that the Sackler name remains at the Met, just tucked away in the museum’s Asian Wing, where there is a gallery still named after Arthur M. Sackler. Arthur died eight years before his brother and nephew took OxyContin to market in 1996. He is known for his collection of Chinese art, perhaps the largest ever assembled. Although Arthur’s widow and descendants have been at pains to distinguish his legacy from the Sacklers’ drug-peddling business, Arthur’s involvement in the acquisition, sale, and exhibition of Chinese art is itself a node in the poppy’s interminable chain of relations. The sheer volume of his collection suggests that many of these Tang-dynasty scrolls and Han-dynasty steles exited China during the nineteenth century, when Anglo-American merchants shunted vast quantities of opium into China while siphoning out equally prodigious amounts of tea, porcelain, silk, and other luxuries, including now priceless works of art. A museum gallery in the West filled with such antiquities and bearing the name Sackler thus closes a centuries-long loop, bringing the “opioid epidemic” of today into séance-like congress with the “opium wars” of the past.
“Where does opium begin, and where does it end?” asks the theorist Mel Y. Chen. The question is blatantly rhetorical, for the pain that opium “treats” is both universal and timeless. Drop down anywhere in the poppy’s network, and you will find people in pain, people crumbling under the weight of everyday life, people who enter the poppy’s network for a temporary release from said pain, only to find themselves lost in a new habit-forming matrix. Readers of books like Ghosh’s want an actionable answer to Chen’s query. They want to know how humanity quits the poppy; they want to know how racial capitalism’s cycles of use and abuse are broken. Because historical writing is customarily divided into periods, each subtended by imagined beginnings and endings, positing such answers has often been the cottage industry of historians. But when history is told through a network’s sprawling tendrils, the arrow of time no longer flies straight. It wobbles, intoxicated, moving with celerity for some and aching slowness for others; it lands, at last, on Latour’s axiom that “literally, a network has no outside.” No exit.
A network-obsessed history like Smoke and Ashes does not earnestly believe that opium will ever end, or that its connections will someday stop proliferating. (Over the course of this eighteen-chapter volume, Ghosh offers only a few piddling suggestions on how to free ourselves from the poppy’s yoke: launch grassroots initiatives like PAIN, basically, and pray the angiosperms are accommodating.) Ghosh sees little sense in dreaming we might lift the poppy’s vise grip on our bodies, especially when the enduring quality of this holding pattern has stayed so hidden from so many people. His goal is elucidative, not prescriptive—to trace and record, ANT-style, opium’s network whenever and wherever he finds it, a practice of “recognition” that Ghosh has previously written of in his book The Great Derangement:
Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition.
To recognize is not to understand, nor is it to discover anything new. Recognition is the scopic version of hearing an echo. The recognizer, Ghosh writes, notices “something prior, an already existing awareness.” In the recognizer’s reintroduction to their awareness, the seed of a historical pattern is sown.
The recognitive process traced by this book starts in Ghosh’s study before sallying out into the world. Readers learn about the dizzying profit margins attained by British drug merchants operating in Qing China, profits that helped maintain the Crown’s hegemony over India, which at the time was the world’s largest producer of opium. We go out to the poppy fields to survey their ignominious conditions: how Bihari peasants were essentially barred from producing anything but opium, “a thirsty, labor-intensive crop”; how the pittances they received from the imperial “Opium Department” fell far short of a livable income; how the legacy of poppy-indenture still haunts the graft-ridden state of Bihar today. We grapple with the Opium Department’s baroque bureaucracy, to which George Orwell’s father belonged, and peer into the inner sanctum of the Ghazipur opium factory, where “barefoot workers [spent] as much as ten hours a day tramping up and down long vats of raw opium.” After leaving these torrid spaces, Ghosh writes,
narcotics flowed through Calcutta like a ghostly river . . . every year, thousands of mango-wood chests, stamped with the seal of the Opium Department, were shipped downriver from the factories of Ghazipur and Patna in closely guarded flotillas of riverboats (and later, in special trains). On arriving in Calcutta, the chests of opium disappeared into fortress-like warehouses, where a select few merchants were invited to inspect them before they were put up for auction. After they had been bid upon and sold, they were transferred directly to the merchant vessels that would carry them to China and the East Indies.
This river of opiates was never an ancillary part of Europe’s imperial mission in Asia. It was the very “keystone of the colonial economy,” a reliable source of income for British India, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies. Much like the rest of that economy, the opium trade did not abide by liberal market principles, dispassionately distributing benefits to equally empowered buyers and sellers (the argument of imperial apologists and narcotics kingpins). Opium formed the crux of a commercial system that “depended crucially on enslavement, coerced labour, [and] smuggling.” The much-ballyhooed free market never existed in this case, and even if it did, it did so as a black market, full stop.
On this point, Ghosh is relentlessly persuasive. He critically examines the circular logic deployed by the British East India Company and other nineteenth-century cartels to justify their opium-trafficking business. Because cultures across Asia had used opium for centuries as a palliative, Western traders liked to see themselves as facilitators for “a pre-existing indigenous practice,” an alibi vouchsafed by the popular theories of nineteenth-century race scientists, who surmised that Asians were naturally predisposed toward opium use, just as some European men were predestined to be alcoholics. Even if the social neuroses of opiate addiction in China were patently clear to foreign observers, and even as multiple bloody wars and smaller skirmishes were fought to ensure this supposedly “free” trade’s constant expansion, the purveyors remained, in their own minds at least, blameless.
While Smoke and Ashes is intent on clearing the air of “self-exculpatory myth-making,” the book avoids telling an ossified narrative of white overlords preying on an amorphous herd of subalterns. To this end, Ghosh spends a hefty portion of his book highlighting the roles that Asian fixers played in the poppy’s transnational networks. He describes the Singaporean and Marwari trading families who built enormous fortunes on bulging chests of opium; the diasporic Chinese who managed poppy plantations on Java; the Indian sepoys who fought and killed for the British at the battle of Sanyuanli. Any forensic accountant could figure out that the majority of the opium racket’s profits flowed westward, but with a slush fund so vast and deep, it is hardly surprising that local factions also cashed in on the poppy imperium’s relentless expansion.
For Ghosh, there is nothing transparently good or evil about a plant whose interactions with humankind range from the hedonistic to the clinical. What isn’t so neutral is the poppy’s “social history”: the swath it’s cut through economic and political landscapes deformed by racist subjugation and mercantile monopolies. Just as Westerners did not really “discover” the New World, they also did not “invent the opium trade.” What they did do was transmogrify that trade into a globe-spanning apparatus whose totality of relations is now impossible to delimit.
Although European empires catalyzed the poppy network’s initial growth spurt, American empire amplified, by many magnitudes, its spatial reach. Smoke and Ashes dedicates two chapters to the American business scions—“Canton Graduates,” Ghosh calls them—who engaged in what is euphemistically referred to as the “China trade.” The boldface names to know here are, again, familiar ones. Astor and Cabot, Delano and Coolidge. You know who these people are, too, or think that you do. Their names are associated in our history books with fur trading, railways, shipping, and other wealth-generating activities. Less known is that these families all participated in the illegal trafficking of opium into China, that much like the Sacklers, they were bosom friends of the poppy.
None of this information has been hidden—the connections have already been made and sometimes even acknowledged. And yet it can be hard to stop genuflecting in old money’s direction. “Opium did not, by any means, account for the entirety of the traders’ businesses,” Ghosh allows, “but their other ventures were entirely predicated on it: they used their earnings from the drug to fund their purchases of teas, porcelain, silk, artworks and much else.” In other words, the Canton Graduates did what any astute underworld operation in a glossy Netflix drama would do: they laundered their money. As for their reputations, these required little to no ablution. American narcos avoided the “stigma associated with opium peddling,” and they were able to do this not because society’s views on drug use were more permissive back then, but because of their race and their class, as well as the geographic placement of their clients. As Ghosh writes, “it was not considered untoward [back then] for white men to inflict incalculable harm on other peoples, especially if it was done in faraway places.”
Canton, or modern-day Guangzhou, created the backdrop for a special phase in the biographies of its graduates. That “strangest of entrepots” was a finishing school for any second or third son on the make who, by dint of family connections, was already functionally made. These young Websters and Foggs came to China to learn, to absorb, to be molded by a new setting and, invariably, to amass. What did they gather from that place? Not just the durability of the traveling salesman (Ghosh cues up an image of Robert Bennett Forbes inspecting the hold of a smuggling ship, sickened by the “effluvia of opium”), but also the vagabond’s love for alien hospitality and local color. Chinese garden design and Chinese fashions, Chinese business practices and Chinese femininity—all of this made its way onto the Canton curriculum, eventually shaping the tastes of America’s landed gentry. After all, these young men would peregrinate home in due time, but only after securing a healthy enough return on their opium investments. Before leaving, many had their oil portraits done in Canton studios, family heirlooms that now bear silent witness to the afterlives of their subjects’ dealings.
Though Ghosh describes nineteenth-century China as a cosmopolitan space of cultural and aesthetic encounter—he is particularly fond of Guangzhou, which he visited while writing his Ibis trilogy of novels—his attention never fully strays from the “profit-making” imperative that undergirds these more palatable forms of exchange. Accentuating this point, he quotes one American merchant’s myopic take on the moral quandaries of dealing opium in Shanghai:
No doubt your anticipations of future evil have a certain foundation . . . But it is my business to make a fortune with the least possible loss of time . . . in two or three years, at farthest, I hope to realize a fortune and get away and what can it matter to me, if all Shanghai disappear afterwards, in fire or flood.
This man is at least honest. He acknowledges, by way of dismissal, that the opium trade’s chickens might one day come home to roost. That a fundamental feature of any material network is that the objects don’t care which way they’re headed, or who they consume.
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By the early years of the twentieth century, as China descended into pandemonium, about ten percent of the country’s population was regularly smoking opium. Fast forward a hundred twenty-five years, and opioids have both escaped their agricultural means of production and contributed to a historic downturn in American life expectancy. Smoke and Ashes makes the case that no human society has ever been capable of handling the poppy’s potencies, and that the road to recovery starts with unlearning the “speciesism” that led us to believe we had control of this network in the first place. “Only by recognizing the power and intelligence of the opium poppy,” Ghosh writes, “can we even begin to make peace with it.”
Frequent readers of Ghosh will detect in this sentence strains of the “vitalist politics” he has espoused across his career as a writer. In both Ghosh’s fiction and nonfiction, elements beyond the purview of the human are forever intervening in “our” storyline—elements we must strive to perceive as worthy interlocutors, as friends and also as foes. Ghosh’s latest plea to recognize a nonhuman being’s power, to put respect on old Papaver’s name, is Smoke and Ashes’ only call to action. Look at this flower, he implores; really put yourself in relation to it. Think of the pain it has nullified, or the paradisiacal feelings it has surfaced. Consider where you are and where you have been in its networks.
At the end of the day, these networks are personal ones. Many of Ghosh’s ancestors hail from the city of Chhapra, “one of the most intensively farmed opium-producing districts in the Gangetic plain.” His is a genealogy of scribes who made a living as bookkeepers for the Opium Department, even though familial lore has carefully skirted this detail. Reading Ghosh’s divulgence, I find myself similarly conscripted, less by the banal fact of being Chinese American than by the spoils of my Ivy League education. Right after college, I spent a year in China on what was called a “purposeful travel fellowship.” My fellowship had been granted, as these things tend to be, by a family of Harvard donors, the Peabody Gardners. I didn’t connect the dots at the time, but my nominal sponsors were descended from Joseph Peabody of Salem, Massachusetts, a man whose wealth directly stemmed from the opium-cum-China-trade (Ghosh briefly mentions Peabody in his chapters on the Canton Graduates). And so, the family whose gift funded my Chinese gap year had accrued a large part of their fortune by selling opium to the Chinese, capitalizing on the same combustible conditions of colonial incursion and domestic dysfunction that indelibly marked the country my grandparents grew up in, the country my parents eventually left. I have never knowingly ingested any form of opium for pain or recreation, not even the codeine in cough syrup. The plant has touched me all the same.
“Opium creates its own temporalities,” asserts Ghosh, and the most common of these is recursion. Near the close of Smoke and Ashes, Ghosh registers many “uncanny synchronicities” between nineteenth-century China and the contemporary United States. Here as in there, now as in then, opium’s spread has coincided with a “steady erosion of trust in figures and institutions,” “the loss of people’s sense of their place in the world,” and a glut of preventable deaths. Even if the network’s directionality and perceived victims have certainly changed—China now exports the precursory agents for making fentanyl to the West—its racializing logic stays fixed. During the recent debates about whether to ban TikTok, an American policy wonk compared the app to an oriental narcotic, claiming that China had designed its own “spinach” version of the app for domestic consumption, while pushing out “the opium version to the rest of the world.”
The metaphor Ghosh likes best for the poppy is that of an “opportunistic pathogen,” a parasite that “goes through long periods of dormancy, affecting very small numbers of people,” but when given an opportunity, “bursts out to rapidly expand its circulation.” His book arrives at a time when the discourse around opioids has noticeably cooled, sending a belated reminder that we are all this organism’s fodder as well as its conspirators, its users and its used. To buffer against the poppy’s next disseminating season, we must try to recognize and narrate these complicities, to find amid opium’s ghostly lattice a few crucial segments of tractability, of holding, of human and inhuman agencies meshed together in war and succor and rest.
I am not much of a plantsman, but last May, after reading Ghosh’s book, I found myself in the uncharacteristic position of having recognized a plant. The poppies covered one side of the hill I live on, a wrinkle in Washington State otherwise lorded over by frat brothers. They sprang up at the end of the semester, a red and black effulgence whose ephemeral blooms would soon expire, leaving behind whip-thin stalks crowned by desiccated seedpods. Historical networks find easy purchase in the manure of quotidian experience. I walked into the field and then out of it. On the other side, a dilapidated van with the bumper sticker tired us marine sat rusting in the sunlight.
To encounter a being of such devilish repute in my little college town is maybe to feel the “dull tug of the underworld’s undertow,” or so Michael Pollan writes after completing his own suburban experiment in opium cultivation. (Pollan wanted to get high, but he also thought the flowers looked pretty.) As Ghosh’s book demonstrates in so many ways, that world—the poppy’s demimonde—has never been all that distant from our own; its tug is not dull, but close at hand, insistent.
I stood on the sidewalk thinking about this tangible node in the poppy’s map of relations: Had the fraternities started their own Ozark-style drug-pushing business? Would the flowers return next spring, or was this a one-time showing? I took a few of the reedy stems home, arranging them in a vase by my bed. The cat feigned indifference, but when I woke up from my nap, I saw she’d reduced the petals to shreds.
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*An essay-review of Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, by Amitav Ghosh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. 416 pp. $32.00). Thomas Dai is the 2026 Georgia Review Critic-at-Large.
