Opium Shop

Although opium was a major crop in the rise of the East India Company, and India the major producer of opium sent to China, with production carefully taxed and recorded, barely a handful of postcards seem to acknowledge the crop and its manufacture.

Amitav Ghosh's great Ibis trilogy (2004-2011) is a fictional recounting of the trade and its importance to Bombay's rise as a port city; most recently Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories (2023) if a brilliant non-fiction account of opium and the role it played, differently, in East and West India and the development of industry in Kolkata and Mumbai, among other subjects taken on with great insight and observation.