Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor for a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century, to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century, to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s. Together these essays show that the complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.

Table of Contents:
ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABBREVIATIONS  Introduction: Opium's History in China Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi  PART ONE • THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT 1. Opium for China: The British Connection Gregory Blue  2. From Peril to Profit: Opium in Late-Edo to Meiji Eyes Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi  PART TWO • DISTRIBUTION AND CONSUMPTION 3· Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia Carl A. Trocki  4· The Hong Kong Opium Revenue, 1845-1885 Christopher Munn  5· Opium in Xinjiang and Beyond David Bello  6. Drug Operations by Resident japanese in Tianjin Motohiro Kobayashi  7· Opium/Leisure/Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption Alexander Des Forges  PART THREE • CONTROL AND RESISTANCE 8. Opium and Modern Chinese State-Making R. Bin Wong  9· Opium and the State in Late-Qing Sichuan judith Wyman  10. Poppies, Patriotism, and the Public Sphere: Nationalism and State Leadership in the Anti-Opium Crusade in Fujian, 1906-1916 Joyce A. Madanry  1 1. The National Anti-Opium Association and the Guomindang State, 1924-1937 Edward R. Slack Jr.  12. Opium Control versus Opium Suppression: The Origins of the 1935 Six-Year Plan to Eliminate Opium and Drugs Alan Baumler  13. The Responses of Opium Growers to Eradication Campaigns and the Poppy Tax, 1907-1949 Lucien Bianco PART FOUR • CRISIS AND RESOLUTION 14. Opium and Collaboration in Central China, 1938-1940 Timothy Brook  15. An Opium Tug-of-War: Japan versus the Wang Jingwei Regime Motohiro Kobayashi  16. Resistance to Opium as a Social Evil in Wartime China Mark S. Eykholt  17. Nationalism, Identity, and State-Building:The Antidrug Crusade in the People's Republic, 1949-1952 Zhou Yongming  BIBLIOGRAPHY  CONTRIBUTORS  INDEX