Peter Thilly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi and author of The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China. He is currently working on a transnational history of the 1853 Small Sword Uprising, tentatively entitled "Small Sword, Big Trouble."
In 1870s China, opium was a legal item of trade. It was also one of the most commonly smuggled goods, and the target of intense contestation between business and government elites. This talk will explain how the people who bought and sold opium made themselves indispensable to the late Qing Self-Strengthening movement. It will examine the opium business in the age of legal opium, and demonstrate how the tax-farming arrangements launched in the late 1850s came to support the late Qing fiscal-military state in an uneven way, by providing essential funds to the local state while also embedding wealthy opium traders in positions of unchecked power.