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- [00:01]
William D. Rimpel
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
Anita Anand
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- [00:51]
Unknown
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- [01:26]
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
- [01:30]
William D. Rimpel
And me, William D. Rimpel.
- [01:32]
Unknown
We left you with one of my favorite episodes, which is when diplomacy goes bad. And it really went very, very badly with the McCartney mission. That should have been fab. Like, you know, not even a quarter of the fab for a full four quarters of fabulousness with Lord McCartney going over to the Chinese and wooing them for their trade, their friendship. Diamond studded mulberry suit. It's just which we found preposterous from beginning to end. His diving bell, his hot air balloon. I mean, he'd done so much homework. He did try. He did try, but like everything that could have gone wrong went wrong for him. But instead, at the end of that episode, we left you with a situation where that balance of payments, which was so in favour of China because all English silver was going towards China for the tea, the insatiable appetite for tea. But it starts to balance out not because they've got a trade deal, but because very quietly and on the sly and on the quiet, the opium trade, which is being mastered by British people, you know, some private individuals who want to make their name have found out how to get opium into China. And William gave us some figures towards the end of that, of just how quickly that opium trade was growing. And this episode, William, is about two particular individuals who are going to be inextricably linked with the now astronomical rise of that opium trade in China. One Mr. Jardine and one Mr. Matheson. And if Jardine Matheson rings a bell, that's because that entity that was sort of grown out of those, well, poppy seeds, if you like, exists today.
- [03:23]
William D. Rimpel
That's a major player still in Hong Kong and in China. And it is an extraordinary story. The way that the British ultimately end up going to war in order to facilitate the narcotics trade. Everything that the opposite of the current war on drugs. The British are fighting for private drug dealers. It's an astonishing moment in imperial history and illustrates, as well as anything, the kind of absurdly venal nature of imperialism, of the way that the entire enterprise of the East India Company operated. Now, one of the things that the McCartney mission was trying to do was to give the British traders greater access to China because they were hemmed in on a single riverbank outside Canton and were not even allowed to visit Canton itself. It was an incredibly restricted life where the different foreign communities were hedged in in little compounds, each one facing the river, each one with its own flag. And that had been the case since the 1720s. And it continued despite the efforts of the Macartney Mission to change that.
- [04:42]
Unknown
Can't stress this enough how strictly this was enforced. So we mentioned that wonderful Stephen Platt book in the episode Imperial Twilight.
- [04:51]
William D. Rimpel
Wonderful book.
- [04:52]
Unknown
Very, very, very. But we're talking about people who had not even been a mile and a half up the road from their particular area of containment. And containment, they wouldn't be allowed, and they also would not dare. So they hadn't even seen the roads connecting their containment to the next habitable place. It was that hermetically sealed their existence.
- [05:17]
William D. Rimpel
And yet from that walled compound, these guys were making fortunes. They were becoming the richest traders in the world in the single largest trade that was going on between the two largest empires in the world, the British Empire and the great Manchu Empire of China. To give you a slightly more visual take on the compounds that they're walled into, there's several of them in a line, and the large ones have the flags of the country they represent on the riverfront. Britain, France, the United States. And inside these compounds, they have everything they need to live. And they're looked after by a vast Chinese staff. There are stewards, servants, cooks, valets, butlers, menial servants to pull the punkers and to deliver them food. Some pens with livestock, pigs, cows, sheep. And inside some of these buildings, you have chandeliers and portraits and chapels and all the paraphernalia of a sort of colonial outpost. But what's important to remember is that none of these are actually owned by the British, the French or the United States.
- [06:39]
Unknown
They're just leaves because none of these.
- [06:41]
William D. Rimpel
Guys are in charge here. Yeah, it's the Chinese who are running the show. And the buildings, every single one of them are owned by Chinese merchants who rent them out to the foreign traders. And the servants are employed, not ultimately by the foreigners who are being served, but by their Chinese superiors. And so it's a very different situation from a colonial situation. These guys are very well tended prisoners, in a sense. Prisoners who are allowed to make fortunes, prisoners who are given every luxury, but they're not in control of their own lives. They're hemmed into these little compounds as long as they want to stay and as long as they continue to make money.
- [07:19]
Unknown
Just, just a little more insight on this kind of prison compound, as you put it. I mean, there are worse places to be. There's living apartments which are really, really spacious and as you said, you know, beautifully decorated. A dining room for more than 100 guests, a billiard room, a library. And the library on Its own has 4000 books.
- [07:38]
William D. Rimpel
Not go short of reading matter.
- [07:40]
Unknown
Yeah, well, I mean, they can't go up the road, so what else can they? What else is there to do apart from play billiards, read books and make money? And that's what they are. I mean, factories in only one sense. I mean, they're factories, as William said in a previous episode, because those people representing the nation are called factors. So they are factories. They are not industrial sites in any way. But if they are churning something out, it is money, it is the ability to make money. And there is a voracious appetite to make more money. They can see what the potential is, even though they can't reach their left arm and their right arm further than the walls of their own compound and a compound that doesn't even belong to them. So, I mean, whose idea, first of all, is this to keep them contained? This is very much a Chinese idyll that you're not going to come and corrupt our people. Yeah, you're not corrupting our people and you're not corrupting our way of life.
- [08:31]
William D. Rimpel
And what's important to remember is that these compounds are only there for the licit trade, for the legal trade. So this is all about buying tea from the Chinese. But that, as we know, is only half the picture. And alongside this, there is a completely different illegal trade going on, often by the same people. But at one remove using Chinese gangsters bringing in opium and uploading it off little offshore islands, uninhabited places where they can transfer them to the boats called crabs, of Chinese gangsters who then distribute it around the Chinese interior. And beyond that, beyond this sort of double system, the licit and the illicit, the legal and the illegal, you have a growing and increasingly repressive machinery in India of the East India Company State, which won't touch the opium in China because it's illegal, but grows it, plans it, sets the price, sets the quality, owns the factories and determines the lives of the planters in Bihar and in Bengal who are producing this most profitable of crops.
- [09:47]
Unknown
So I mean, if you were to look at it as an industry, you have the entire supply chain from seed to export, which is controlled by the British, the East India Company largely. But distribution then needs to be a bilateral affair. And it's not legal, it is not allowed, it is not meant to be something that is claimed by a country, but even though it's been cornered by one particular country. So this kind of thuggery and a sort of almost parallel militarization that is going on is going to prove crucial in what we've referred to before, a growing appetite for opium in China and the violent illicit ways it is distributed around the country and also the way in which that monopoly is protected and controlled.
- [10:35]
William D. Rimpel
What I think we should look at now is the increasing power and the increasingly repressive authority of the East India Company's opium department. Now this, as we said, is not involved in selling opium to the Chinese. It's only involved in the manufacture and the creation of opium. But as opium becomes a more and more important crop, the East India Company gives over more and more of Bihar, the entire area, as far as Benares, which is now in Uttar, to this crop. And by the second half of the 19th century, roughly half a million acres have come to be sown with poppy. And it's very labor intensive agriculture. They probably control the lives of between 5 and 7 million people.
- [11:26]
Unknown
Those numbers are eye watering. You need to understand how if you are in control of that many people, you have their fate entirely in your hands. So just as later on with India and when it's the Raj that's in charge and they tell farmers and growers that they must grow indigo instead of food crops. The same thing is happening here with opium in the East India Company. If you're in control of 5 to 7 million people, what you're telling them is this is what you will do. We're in charge of you, you will Grow this stuff. And sometimes, you know, the side effect of that is that you have farmers who aren't able to feed their families.
- [12:02]
William D. Rimpel
Well, the system is that the man in charge of each district is the opium agent, which is a deceptively humble title for a man that's actually very highly paid and very, very powerful and controls a great area of India. And he has below him British East India Company officials, then local strongmen below that at the next level. One of these, for example, is Henry Osborne, who keeps a diary that Amitav Ghosh writes about in his wonderful book Smoke and Ashes and Ashes. And he writes that Henry Osborne sleeps with a pistol under his mattress, suffering frequent bouts of depression, some brought about by his wife's singing. So you can see this unhappy couple stuck in the middle of Bihar.
- [12:52]
Unknown
Everyone's a critic.
- [12:53]
William D. Rimpel
That's really harsh, but this is interesting. Listen. So Osborne has got a colleague called Richard W. Blair, who has brought his family out to live in the small town of Bihar, where he's posted as sub deputy opioid agent. So he's a very junior figure in this hierarchy. And it's there, in a place called Moti Hari near the Nepal border, that Eric Blair, who later took the name George Orwell, is born in 1903 at the very end of this story.
- [13:22]
Unknown
I mean, George Orwell, people, that's what he said. I just want to repeat it in case, you know, they didn't hear it. The George Orwell, born in India, son of a sub deputy opium agent. It's extraordinary.
- [13:36]
William D. Rimpel
And he, of course, is quickly, like all children of the Raj, sent abroad for education. That whole world that Kipling writes about in Baa Baa, Black sheep. So he's sent away. So he doesn't grow up amid these poppy fields, but he does when he comes back as a junior Imperial policeman, he does smoke it in Burma, because.
- [13:55]
Unknown
He'S stationed in Burma, isn't he? I mean, that's where he's a police officer. Yeah.
- [13:59]
William D. Rimpel
Certainly he implies that because he says in one of his writings in his Burma book, Burmese Days, what are the pleasures of opium? Like other pleasures, they are fortunately, indescribable. So it's very interesting, although we're Talking about the 1830s in this episode, this continues on right through to Orwell, who is the great mystic, if you like, of authoritarianism in the mid 20th century, that the author of 1984, the author of Animal Farm and a host of other extraordinary classics.
- [14:31]
Unknown
And just as with Animal Farm, you know, you have pigs running things, and everybody else running themselves ragged to try and supply the pigs. I mean, Orwell would have been aware of how difficult the lives of the opium farmers were who were trying to fulfill these orders that are coming from, you know, apart from anyone else, his dad, and others who work above his dad. Because it is a wretched life for an opium grower. First of all, the prices are fixed. You have no say in what your crop is worth. Worth. You're just told this is what you're growing. It is set by, you know, Brits who come and they tell you what you have to do. And it is a very low rate. I mean, you've got some numbers, William, which will just tell you how. How much into poverty it plunged people to grow.
- [15:14]
William D. Rimpel
So I've very much relying here on Amitav Ghosh's book Smoke and Ashes. And Amitav is a friend. He has written three extraordinary novels set amid the opium fields of Bihar and the Canton opium wars and the lives of indentured laborers. It's a brilliant trilogy. And Smoke and Ashes, he talks about the sources of his fiction. He talks about the big Ghazipur opium factory, which is the industrial center of the opium trade. It's set up at the time of Lord Cornwallis, who famously was the man who surrendered to Washington, who in the 1780s at Yorktown, hands over the keys of America to Washington and then gets recruited by the East India Company, where among the many reforms that he makes in India, he sets up this quasi military fortress like opium factory surrounded by high red brick walls. And he turns Ghazipur, which had previously been a Mughal center in the middle of what's now Uttar Pradesh, into a company town dedicated entirely to the creation of opium. It was a pretty miserable life for the humans who work in it. They're barefoot. The processing is done entirely by hand. These barefoot workers spend as much as 10 hours a day, according to Amitav, tramping up and down the long vats of opium. The fumes are so heavy, he writes, that they often become sleepy and lethargic. Many visitors remark on the powerful smell that pervades the factories. The air is redolent with opium, not with narcotic and purified odor of the finished drug, but the odor of indescribable nastiness. One of the people who visits it is Kipling, as we just talked about him. And the only people that seem to be happy in this miserable industrial narcotic center are the troops of monkeys who apparently love to lap up the F words that flow out of the factory's. Drains. And according to Amitav, they're the most contented and dragged called monkeys in all of Hindustan.
- [17:20]
Unknown
So I mean, apart from having, you know, sort of junky monkeys. Junky monkeys, isn't that great?
- [17:26]
William D. Rimpel
Very good.
- [17:26]
Unknown
The numbers that I was trying to wheedle out of you, I'll give them now because I found them now. So I mean, the rate at which the price of opium was fixed is, is so ridiculously low. And it stays at this rate. It's 3 rupees and 50 pasa for a sear which is a little more than a kilogram of raw opium. And that stays the same price for decades. So it doesn't matter what the markets are doing, it doesn't matter what the demand is. It is 3 and a half rupees for more than a kilogram of raw opium. As William described it before, there is a sort of a refinement process that goes on. A lot of flowers go into manufacturing this clump of black delirium in PM terms. And so, you know, you can see why, apart from living in what seems like a hellscape from what Amitav writes, you're also always on the verge of starvation because you don't have money and you also, you have land, but you don't have the wherewithal or the power to grow the things that you need. Food, for example.
- [18:28]
William D. Rimpel
And Amitav quotes the farmers, he's found petitions by the farmers saying, can we just grow ordinary food? You know, we just want to grow grain, we want to grow rice like everybody else. And their petition ends. We cultivate the poppy under pressure from government, otherwise we would not do. And our prayer is that we may be released from this trouble. So these guys have no option but to grow this stuff which makes everyone money except them, the actual opium farmers. Cause the price is fixed because they're not given the market price. They are poorer and poorer. But this is the most successful trade in early 19th century India. I think it's important to, in a sense, zoom out for a second. India hugely enriched 18th century Britain particularly because of the textile trade, which was the most advanced in the world. The gorgeous cotton, the amazing silks, all the kalamkaris and painted textiles that India produced were hot property in the 18th century. And the British East India Company makes its money by shipping all those textiles abroad. But by the early 19th century, India has ceased to make money because it's now become the Raj. It's all solidified into a very expensive place to administer. And the sums are not adding up. And the only thing which makes the economics work, particularly after the company has lost a lot of money adding Afghanistan or attempting to add Afghanistan to its properties, which again, more than anything else, requires massive troops in forts all over the country to try and keep the Afghans in order. And it's an enormously expensive place to police and brings in very little money. So the East India Company would be completely in the red but for the amazing success that they've had with opium sales. And I gave the figures before, but it's worth having them again. You move from about 200 chests of opium in 1767, and that increases within a decade to about 1000 by 1800. Twenty years later, it's up to 5000. Chess. It actually grows to be the keystone of the colonial economy. I like this, which again, is from Amitav's book. He has found a U.S. national Defense University document which says English merchants led by the East India Company from 1772 to 1850, established an extensive opium supply train, creating the world's first drug cartel.
- [21:07]
Unknown
Oh, he has such a turn of phrase. He has another turn of phrase which I'm going to read out as well from Amitabh's book, which he says, you know that the colonial economy that you've just described, which is underpinned and now carried after the Raj, has taken over, and it's now very expensive to run a country and take control as it has. And he says, like the yeast in bread dough, this is the substance upon which the entire structure depended. I mean, he's a neat writer. He's a very memorable thing there. But I mean, what is the legal situation now? I mean, they've industrialized the production, they have fixed the prices, but you still need to export. And I said that was something that wasn't yet in their hands. But how are the exports growing at the rate at which you suggest they're growing?
- [21:53]
William D. Rimpel
So that's where we come to these two figures, Jardine and Matheson. So the company, because it's a legal structure, feels that it can grow the opium, it can fill the chests, it can build the factory, organize the farmers into the largest drug cartel in the world. But it feels it can't actually be responsible for selling it illegally in China. So what happens is that the opium gets sent under guard. I mean, this is very, very valuable material.
- [22:24]
Unknown
Some people call it black gold, don't they, sometimes, because it is that valuable.
- [22:28]
William D. Rimpel
So it gets sent in heavily guarded fleets down the Ganges to Calcutta. It's then put onto the Quayside and pretty close to the quayside, it's auctioned off to private traders and that's where figures like Jardine and Matheson come in. They buy the opium, they take the risk and it's up to them to distribute it. So the British, of course, know exactly what's going on. This isn't covert at all, but they can deny it in the court of law that, oh, I didn't know what's going to happen to it.
- [22:54]
Unknown
Can I just say that these are auctions that are in the open air in front of the busy, bustling sort of quayside. It's not done secretly. There's not even done in barns at the dead of night. You have these big chests that are on the quayside. If you've ever seen in films, you know, the sort of the auctioning of livestock, you know, they just keep. That is how these auctions take place. That is how people are outbidding each other. Not whispering as you would with an illegal trade, but yelling at the tops of their voices to try and outbid their competitors. So everybody knows, everyone knows this is. You would have to be blind and deaf not to know this is going on. So it is just to give you plausible deniability that you keep it slightly outside the edge of what you're doing.
- [23:36]
William D. Rimpel
Now. The British are not the only people who can grow opium, of course. And as we saw in one of the very first episodes of this series, there has always been. Traditional opium trade in India isn't something that's been introduced by the British, nor even was the idea of selling opium to China a British innovation. This is something that the Moguls and Bengali shippers have been doing for generations. It continues outside Company India. Remember at this point in the 1830s, there's great swathes of India that are not under Company control. There's the whole Maratha areas in central India and those areas are also big opium producing centers. So you have, as well as the official East India Company opium trade, which is happening under the Opium Agency in Bihar, then sending the opium in fleets down the Ganges to Calcutta, where it's being spirited off by private traders away from the of the Company and off their books. As well as that, you have a rival consortium growing whereby in the Maratha territories, in what's now Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka and Maharashtra, you have Indian growers buying opium from peasants who are not under the authority of the Opium Agency, but nonetheless are being effectively under almost as much pressure. Because this is the Marwari money lenders. They're Giving loans to poor farmers. Often the farmers like today, can't repay it. There's also a measure of coercion. And this opium, which is slightly different, it has a higher morphine quality, so smokers like it very much. And yet it's less reliable because as it doesn't come out of a single company factory, it's more open to adulteration. So chalk and talc and all sorts of other things get shoved into it, like with modern cocaine on the street of America or Britain, or heroin. It's often adulterated, but nonetheless. So there's two completely different streams. And this ends up in Karachi, which in the 1830s is not yet under Company control. It will become so by the 1840s. It comes out of Goa, but in particular it comes out of Bombay. And Bombay is an opium town. And particularly the greatest traders of Bombay, who are the Parthians, that's the Zoroastrians, who'd fled Iran, set themselves up in Gujarat and then Bombay and have great, great commercial skills. These guys organize, if you like, a rival cartel which is initially in competition with the company. But what's fascinating, what we'll see, is that quite a lot of the British realize that the Parsis are as good or better than they are at this.
- [26:17]
Unknown
Well, they're better connected.
- [26:18]
William D. Rimpel
Language skills, better connected.
- [26:19]
Unknown
Absolutely, yeah.
- [26:20]
William D. Rimpel
And so what you find is that in many of these cases, the same sort of private traders who are buying company opium on the keys of Calcutta are in business with the Parsis, who are doing the Indian opium out of Madhya Pradesh and the Central and exporting it out of Bombay.
- [26:38]
Unknown
You've got basically two flavors, two flavours to choose from, and the Parsis are involved in both, which is one of the reasons they become, and some families become fabulously wealthy in Bombay, the Bombay Parsees in particular. Particular we're going to talk about some of them in more detail after the break. But just before we take the break, you were telling me in one of our little gossipy chats, and I hope it's all right to share it with the listeners, about a friend of yours that you've just been chatting to, who you said was quite happy to be described as a former user of heroin and opium who has experienced that kind of Bombay opium den that has remained unchanged for a very long time.
- [27:19]
William D. Rimpel
So literally this weekend I was on stage with my friend Jeet Dial, who is one of India's leading poets and a Booker shortlisted novelist. Now, Jeet wrote a book a few years ago called Narcopolis, which is about the Opium dens in Bombay. And in his youth, he's now in his mid-60s, but in his youth he remembers going to the last opium dens of Bombay where people lay down, used these he called very beautiful antique pipes which were made specially for this in Bombay. And he said there was a great art to people taking these little balls of opium, giving it just the right contact with the flame and then getting it going and handing it to the hipsters. That's where that word comes from. Because you're lying on your hip.
- [28:08]
Unknown
Lying on your hip. I love that. You said that a couple of episodes ago and I still haven't got over it. Yeah.
- [28:12]
William D. Rimpel
And Jeet was one of these hipsters and they were abolished in 1984. And Jeet said that it was a catastrophe because the opium that was smoked in Bombay was many times less addictive than heroin. And when Bombay opium Dems were closed in 1984, almost all the users who got some sort of habit that they were living with often for 20 or 30 years, went over to heroin. And the Bombay heroin was the worst quality heroin coming out of Afghanistan.
- [28:41]
Unknown
It was a devastating plague. I mean, the number of people who died.
- [28:45]
William D. Rimpel
Exactly. And he said they all. He said that many of his friends died after the dens closed. But he has sort of. I mean, you know, maybe it's just a romantic memory of a man who remembers what he was doing as a teenager and he's now in his mid-60s, but he remembers. Extraordinary. I think of sort of opium dens as something that happened in Fu Manchu novels in 1918 90s or something.
- [29:05]
Unknown
People dying all over the place. Yeah, no, absolutely. But this is 1984, so we have had a half with both George Orwell and 1984 in it. Just saying. Weird, isn't it? Join us after the break.
- [29:23]
Al Murray
Hi there, I'm Al Murray, co host of WWIUpod. We have ways of making you talk the world premier second World War history podcast from Gull Hanger.
- [29:32]
James Holland
And I'm James Holland and together we tell the greatest stories from the war. Our latest series focuses on the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe and the often untold closing stages of World War II.
- [29:44]
Al Murray
And we've got so much to talk about in this series, from the daring Allied crossings of the River Rhine to the last hours in the bombed out streets of Berlin. It is amazing how little this has been talked about before in popular media.
- [29:55]
James Holland
Exactly, Al. And this is more than just units moving across maps, but real human stories on an individual level as well as great powers Jostling in a new nuclear world.
- [30:06]
Al Murray
If this sounds good to you, we've got a short taste for you.
- [30:09]
William D. Rimpel
Search.
- [30:09]
Al Murray
We have ways. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [30:21]
Unknown
Welcome back. So just 1984, William, was a book by George Orwell.
- [30:28]
William D. Rimpel
Looking at me like, what, 1984, when the opium dens got closed down, Literally just told us. Anyway, and so often, Anita, I miss so many of your gems. It's weeks later sometimes that I get the punchlines.
- [30:43]
Unknown
Can I just say that nothing is as healthy for comedy is explaining it in painful, horrible detail. So thanks. Thanks for that. Right, okay, so we were talking about some of these, the names that are going to become enormously important. Let's park the Parsi names for a second because we've given you the Parsi landscape and the Bombay landscape. But I want to home in again in more detail on these names. Jardine and Matheson, who are, as you say, enormous players in the world market today in all sorts of different things. Stocks and shares and other things, real estate, pharmaceuticals and many other things. But in their day, who were William Jardine and James Matheson? And we're talking about now the 1830s.
- [31:29]
William D. Rimpel
1830S is what we're going to be homing in because this is the lead up to the first Opium War. How on earth did Britain end up going to war for the right to sell narcotics? This is one of the great sort of extraordinary stories of imperial history. And if you were to point to two British men that did more than anyone to get Britain into that situation, it would be these two tough as nails Scotsmen, William Jardine and James Matheson. Both of these men, if you were talking to them in their gentleman's club, would have insisted that they were providing a service, that they weren't creating a problem. They would have pointed to the Chinese as these people who always smoked opium, which was partially true. Jardine, in his letters, goes as far as to say, it is the safest, most gentlemanlike speculation I'm aware of.
- [32:22]
Unknown
Oh, so he's actually doing a favour to the world, is he?
- [32:25]
William D. Rimpel
Okay, you just see Pablo Escobar pulling that one off.
- [32:30]
Unknown
It is, even today, the excuse of drug pushers. I'm not creating the demand. If it wasn't me, it would be someone worse. I mean, it literally is that. But look, I want to know who they are. Can you give us the origin story of both men?
- [32:43]
William D. Rimpel
Okay, so they're from very different backgrounds. William Jardine is born on. I think he's from Kookubri. I think he's from the west of Scotland. In 1784, he lost his father at the age of nine. He scraped through Edinburgh's medical school and he ends up going out to India as an East India Company doctor. And one of the perks of the job is the opportunity to develop commercial sidelines. That was true throughout the whole history of the East India Company Company. All these guys were busy trading on their own account as well as on the company. And officers were allowed to take 2 tons of goods for their own goods, and they didn't always use this space. So Jardine, being the financially very astute Scotsman that he was and coming from a poor background and needing to make the money, he didn't have family money to fall back on. He was supporting his family back home. So he begins to trade on his own account and soon finds that opium is one of the things that he can make money out of.
- [33:48]
Unknown
He's not, you know, hitting the ground running and saying, I've got two tons of an allowance, I'm going to just buy two tons of opium. I mean, this is a gradual build up, but a pretty quick build up.
- [33:56]
G
Yeah.
- [33:56]
William D. Rimpel
He's asking his friends, you know, he sees that somebody down the ship has just got one trunk, you know, can.
- [34:02]
Unknown
I put some, Can I borrow some of your space for this? Uh huh.
- [34:05]
William D. Rimpel
So he's from a very humble background and it's three years in, into this business that he meets his lifelong partner, who's another Scot, but from a very different background. James Matheson is the son of the Chief of Clan Matheson and I have to say, our distant relations of mine. My marriage. I remember two elderly Matheson men with large mustaches, chests full of opium. No, they were both very special guardsmen.
- [34:31]
Unknown
Can we stop talking about your pet family just for one second? Could you focus just for one second? So this James Matheson, though, he's a younger man than William Jardine, he's about 12 years younger. He is a different temperament as well to Jardine. So whereas Jardine is the medical student who also, we should say, has been kind of stung by his speculating because, you know, for a man who doesn't have a backup plan and he's the one who's providing for his family and he puts everything into this, it doesn't always work out because, you know, he does forfeit his entire £40 wages one time on only his second voyage, which actually speaks, you know, well, of at least his fortitude, if not his aims and his trade. He loses his entire 40 pounds wages because, you know, there's Damage incurred during a typhoon in Canton. The boat goes down or it's flooded with water and he loses everything. But he, you know, even after coming out of that, he thinks, no, this is still worth it. I mean, I'll scrape together the money again. I know I've lost an absolute fortune, a crippling fortune, but I'm going to do it again. Now, James Matheson, the younger man and the posher man, he doesn't have that fear because he comes from means. He's got a family that will bail him out if his shenanigans don't work out. For Jardine, it's kind of life and death. He either, you know, rises or falls by this speculation. But for Matheson, it's almost. I don't know, is it fair to say it's almost a sort of a sideline tinkering, you know, that I'm gonna make my name because I can.
- [35:56]
William D. Rimpel
It may start like that, but he. I mean, both of these guys, we may not like what they do and so on, but they're both super stupid businessmen who make unbelievable fortunes in a difficult trade. And Matheson is tough, too. At one point, he gets a blow on the head during a kerfuffle in Canton, which we're going to deal with later in this story, whereupon he gets the Chinese nickname that translates as iron headed old rat.
- [36:24]
Unknown
That's nice.
- [36:25]
William D. Rimpel
These guys were tough. They take control of an existing firm that's originally called Maniac and co and in 1832, they rename it as Jardine, Matheson & Co. And it endures to this day as a huge conglomerate.
- [36:38]
Unknown
Well, it's renamed now as Jardine's. It's actually, actually poor old Matheson's, you know, relatives aren't going to be because Jardine's there, just Jardines. But if you go to the website, which I did, it is still, you know, Jardine and Matheson, but the name, the sort of. The name that everyone knows now is Jardine's.
- [36:53]
William D. Rimpel
I should tell a naughty story that when I went to lecture there, I got one of the local Hong Kong taxis. And as he dropped me off, I said, is this the building? He said, yes, very easy to tell. It's designed so that this skyscraper, you know, it's a modern high rise building, but the windows around to look like the portholes of a ship as a reference to the.
- [37:14]
Unknown
Oh, really? To this.
- [37:15]
William D. Rimpel
And he said, sir, we call it now the Building of a Thousand Arseholes. Anyway, naughty story.
- [37:27]
Unknown
I didn't see that coming. But.
- [37:31]
William D. Rimpel
So Crucial bit of the story. So there's Jardine and the Bassett, both of them Scots. But the business really takes off when they take on board a Parsi partner with them. And this guy is not Ennio Parsi. This is Jamsetji Jijiboy, who was one of the great patrons of Bombay to this day. There's a JJ School of Art of Bombay, which is the cutting edge art school in India named after this guy. And so you have yet again this partnership that we've found before in other stories of Scots and Parsees joining together to make money. And what's interesting is his life story echoes in some ways that of Jardine. He was orphaned at 13 and he enters the China trade trying to make his fortune. He makes a voyage to Calcutta in 1799 as an apprentice for one of of his Parsi cousins. He begins chartering ships with borrowed money. And in 1805 he meets Jardine when he takes a passage to Canton on the same company ship that Jardine is a surgeon on. And they're captured by a French frigate. So this is not an easy business, you know, this is the period of the Napoleonic Wars. They're caught by the French.
- [38:45]
Unknown
Don't feel too sorry for them. They are big drug dealers. But anyway, yes, okay, so they get captured and they get. Are they treated badly by the French?
- [38:52]
William D. Rimpel
They are abandoned by their French captains at the Cape of Good Hope. And Jardine and Gigi Boy make their way separately home in 1805. But have got each other's. Or they wouldn't have got each other's numbers, but they would have got each.
- [39:05]
Unknown
Other'S addresses, presumably got each other's digits, have they? Okay, right.
- [39:09]
William D. Rimpel
And this scares Gigi Boy about traveling again. He doesn't like leaving Bob Bay after this, but he is the financial genius doing the books and running the business out of the west of India.
- [39:21]
Unknown
He's basically senior management at this point. He's not going to get his hands dirty. He's going to be senior management. Right?
- [39:27]
William D. Rimpel
And he sends his cargo under consignment to Canton under an agent. And from the 1820s, that is always William Jardine. So my lecture, when I went to the Jardines building, to the building of a thousand arsenals in Hong Kong.
- [39:41]
Unknown
Can't you say you're not being invited back after this? That is for one time and one time only, William D'Aramboe.
- [39:49]
William D. Rimpel
And I should apologize to my Matheson cousins who I hope are not offended by any of this. When you go to that building, the lecture room, is in the penthouse at the top. You press the top button on the lift, you go whizzing up and you come out and there's this palatial room facing you. Larger than life size is an enormous portrait, I think, by Chinnery of Jamsetji Jiji Boy.
- [40:09]
Unknown
What does it look like? I mean, he's this sort of big.
- [40:12]
William D. Rimpel
Florid Parsi, slightly overweight, with lots of facial hair, wearing the Mogul robes that Parsis wear in the 19th century. And still their priests wear these sort of. It's like Mogul court clothes. And they have this little red hat. He's very much the businessman. You can see what a canny operator he is, just from the portrait. But I like it that he's still there. You don't see Jardine or Matheson when you walk out the lift. It's Jamset Jijiji boy that's there.
- [40:34]
Unknown
Right. I've seen another portrait of him not wearing the Mogul clothes, by the way. If you want to look him up. I mean, it's interesting. Just. It's nice to see these people's faces. But he looks like a retired geography teacher, but he's wearing a very fine and expensive Western suit. He's not in that kind of Mughal finery, but he is wearing that sort of very distinctive Parsi hat. Still cane in his hand. You can see it's got an ivory carved handle. This is a man who. The picture is just screaming wealth. I am wealthy. I'm very, very rich. It's a very fetching, very striking picture. A photograph. Not a portrait, a photograph of him, anyway. As you were.
- [41:10]
William D. Rimpel
So what happens next is very interesting. We said earlier that James Matheson is well connected and from a sort of posh establishment background. He eventually goes back to London and begins lobbying parliamentarians. That's before he buys a rotten baron but enters Parliament himself. But initially he's lobbying other MP in his sights. He has the East India Company. This is now the 1830s, and there is a growing movement in Britain that says that this monopoly is damaging for business, that it shouldn't be a monopoly, it should be open to all. Matheson stirs this up. He commissions people to write articles. He gets people to raise it on the floor of Parliament. And he commissions, for example, an article in the Edinburgh Review in 1831 which says, the Parliament of Great Britain have it in their power to open new and boundless markets for the products of our artisans, as they are called, to assist in forwarding the civilization of the Eastern world. I love that's how they talk about the opium trade. The East India Company's monopoly checks the spirit of improvement, paralyzes industry and upholds ignorance and barbarism in vast countries. Its abolition will rebound to the advantage of every man in England. The gentleman in the factory only accepted and they get it. Within a couple of years, the East India Company monopoly is broken. And Suddenly, in the 1830s, anyone is allowed to enter this trade. And the news reaches Canton of this momentous change in 1833. Now, not only does the company not control this trade, but according to Jardine, who's one of the very first to hear about it because he's getting the news directly from Matheson in Britain, the company will not even be allowed by the British government to continue trading in China at all.
- [43:09]
Unknown
That's so interesting. What a turnaround for the economy at the time.
- [43:13]
William D. Rimpel
This is like sort of Trump's tariffs.
- [43:14]
Unknown
Or can I also. Another turnaround. So in the last episode, or it might have been the one before that, we were talking about what Westerners thought of China and, you know, Voltaire, thinkers, they all regarded China as. As deeply civilized, incredibly advanced people who deserve to be our friends, was the way I tried to characterize it. You know, that we are the Brits, we're the best, but, you know, the Chinese deserve us in their lives. They weren't native, they didn't describe in the same way they described Indians or Africans or any. Any other indigenous people. This changes with Jardine and Matheson. So can I just read you a little, little thing that James Matheson, who is going to be one of the most powerful men, British men in China at the time, he writes this about the Chinese. He says the Chinese are a people characterized by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit and obstinacy, who nevertheless were blessed with the possession of, in his words, a vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth. So you've got this enormous turnaround where the lens is now cracked and it is being presented by a man who only wants to make money, who doesn't care about the chinoiserie. He does not give of two poops about, you know, the kind of silks or, you know, the kind of ceremony. None of that matters to him. These are now lower species of humans and that will become the pervading attitude. It is a such a gear shift and it's so stark and so different to what was being presented before.
- [44:45]
William D. Rimpel
So Stephen Platt, in his wonderful book Imperial Twilight, makes the breaking of the East India Company Monopoly, the moment when everything changes. And the reason is that according to Platt, what happens now is you get a free for all. Where any British trader, even if he has absolutely no experience of China or the Chinese, anyone that wants to make money turns up in this sort of opium rush in China. And of course it's not these guys who are actually distributing the opium, they are all in hock to Chinese gangsters.
- [45:20]
Unknown
Right.
- [45:20]
William D. Rimpel
And so as with the modern drug trade in Europe or in America where you have illegal drugs, you've got gangsters selling it with violence, with gangs, with all the paraphernalia of illicit trade. So not only is unlimited quantities of opium now coming in as everyone tries to sell it, the company had at least kept vaguely to a set of agreed rules in order to maintain the trade on a sort of equilibrium. Now it's a free for all.
- [45:55]
Unknown
They were civilized drug dealers.
- [45:58]
William D. Rimpel
Relative certainly to what comes now. And so this whole world of private traders like Jardine and Matheson and Gigi Boy become more and more in hoc to the world of Chinese gangsters. And what happens is that the clippers, they design these extra fast opium vessels called opium clippers, which are designed specifically as the sort of Porsches of the maritime world so that they can outrun any of the Chinese junks.
- [46:25]
Unknown
Can I talk about one of them? I mean it's just, just because I like this, I like the idea of the boats that take them. So I mean you talked about crabs first of all, that used to, used to do the bringing over. So these are fast crabs which are, which are heavily armed to, you know, if you've got government vessels pulling up alongside, you want a fast crab on your side because they will just shoot. They, they have the ability to fire when approached. But you, I love this. The long slim Chinese smuggling boats which are the centipedes or fast crabs, depending on who you talk to.
- [46:56]
William D. Rimpel
Scrambling dragons, they're also.
- [46:58]
Unknown
Scrambling dragons is so much better than fast crab. A centipede I like very much. But these are the ones that have opium loaded on them because they are swift and they can make quick getaways.
- [47:08]
William D. Rimpel
And they're called centipedes because they've got rows of 70 oarsmen and these guys are, these guys are motoring. Yeah.
- [47:16]
Unknown
So, you know, you can see how when you have, have private interest involved, you have. I mean, in a way, sad, isn't it? But it's true. Private investment leads to innovation. So you've got suddenly, you know, whereas these old clunky things were bringing opium over, now they are Faster, they are quicker and they're better armed to do it.
- [47:34]
William D. Rimpel
So this is the run. The clippers from Bombay, Karachi and Calcutta sail up as far as Lin Tin, which is this sort of almost deserted island about a third of the way between Hong Kong and Canton. There they liaise with the scrambling dragons and the fast crabs and the opium is shunted from the East India Company clipper out of sight into these Chinese vessels and off they go into the Chinese interior. And as well as the violence of the gangs who run these scrambling dragons, as again with modern America, the corruption of the officials who are paid to turn a blind eye to let this stuff in. So there's a whole ecosystem that's gaining by this. It isn't just the private traders like Jardine Matheson and Gigi Boy.
- [48:29]
Unknown
The supply line economics theory is what it is.
- [48:32]
William D. Rimpel
And so all sorts of people are in on this from the local officials who are being paid off not to.
- [48:38]
Unknown
Do it, because it's still illegal. It's totally legal, it's totally illegal. It's not allowed to happen. The Chinese have said no to opium, Just saying no. They've been just saying no for a very long time, even though some of them are hypocrites and, you know, some of the very rich ones have been taking this stuff for quite a long time.
- [48:53]
William D. Rimpel
But while they've been saying it, they also are, you know, taking backhanders. And according to one British dealer who testifies to a government committee, and this is in the parliamentary report in 1830, every now and then there is a very strong Egypt from the Chinese against the trade. But like other Chinese edicts, it is nearly powerless. It imposes a little difficulty, perhaps for the moment, and enables the mandarins to extort more from the dealers.
- [49:19]
Unknown
I'm sure corruption everywhere. There's lots of money, there is corruption, but there is also. I would only just temper this with the different view of now, the Chinese now, the view is they are corruptible and stupid and obstinate. But the legal status of opium, and I keep stressing this, what brought Britain is doing and what it has unleashed and what it was doing under the East India Company and what it has now allowed as a growth industry with all its supply line benefits is illegal. It is illegal drug stealing in a country that says it doesn't want these drugs.
- [49:48]
William D. Rimpel
On one hand, you've got China being corrupted, being turned over to violence. That's even before you start the whole business of great sways of the population just lying on their backs smoking opium rather than doing productive work. But while all this is happening, Jardine and Matheson, who we met and these two, while China is falling apart, are genuinely rising up the social system in Britain. And just to look ahead at what happens to them, because it's interesting to compare it to the collapse in China, Jardine returns to London. He becomes the military advisor on China to Lord Palm, the Foreign Secretary. He then ends up in the House of Commons just like Clive had done before him. I mean, there are many people who take a very dim view of him. And one of the most amusing sort of scurrilous portraits of him is by Disraeli, no less, in his novel Sybil, right? And he says, one of the characters in Sybil says, o dreadful man. A Scotchman richer than Croesus. One Mr. Druggie. This, this is the 1850s, this is written. One Mr. Druggie, fresh from Canton, with a million in opium in each pocket, denouncing corruption and bellowing free trade. And when he dies, his seat passes to guess who? Matheson. Matheson takes out the same seat in the end, retires from the trade and he buys the Hebridean Isle of Lewes for half a million pounds and reinvents himself as a laird doing good works. So on one hand you've got the sort of growing collapse of China and on the other hand you've got these guys reinventing themselves completely and becoming most respectable.
- [51:29]
Unknown
Why do drug oligarchs always buy islands? It's a thing, isn't it? It's a story as old as time. What do you do with all the money from your ill gotten gains? Buy an island.
- [51:40]
William D. Rimpel
Didn't Escobar also buy a zoo and fill it with hippos? And now there's all these hippos. All hippos in Colombia. Don't think there are any hippos on the Isle of Lewis.
- [51:50]
Unknown
We're coming to an end of this episode, but we've painted a picture for you of in two generations you've had this almost complete turnaround of attitude of the British towards the Chinese, but also of the Chinese's ability to police their own country, if you like. It's been. If you've let private enterprise in, you've not just got one spear point to deal with, you've got death by a thousand pricks, you've got all of these. And I say the word pricks twice.
- [52:15]
William D. Rimpel
Very good. But what happens that changes all this? Free for all. And this is the crucial thing, is not only is it addiction, gangs, violence and corruption. There's one other Thing that's happening is that finally China, which had been the massive drain of European silver and gold for the previous 50 years, now suddenly the silver is disappearing. And remember, all this is happening in Canton, miles from the capital in Beijing. But the disappearance of silver is noted in the court. The emperor can't see the fast crabs and obviously the officials are not reporting that they are taking back.
- [52:58]
Unknown
They're far too polite to tell him what's happening.
- [53:01]
William D. Rimpel
But he notices the drain of silver. Silver begins to disappear. It goes up in price. It becomes much rarer. And he starts investigating and realizes that things have reached a pitch where he has to intervene. And so he calls for his best man. There is one man who's renowned in the Chinese civil service of the day as the most able and honest of all the civil servants. And this is Commissioner Lin. Bom bom. Hear more about the incredibly effective, effective Commissioner Lin in the next episode.
- [53:38]
Unknown
He's such an interesting character. So yeah, can't wait for that one. Actually, if you can't wait, because I know some of you can't, the best way to deal with that itch that needs a scratching is to join the club. Empirepoduk.com empirepoduk.com Then you don't have to wait for our regular release times. You just go, I want it all and I want it now on a fast crab. Bring me my next episode. And that's what will happen if you're a member of the club. So empirepoduk.com otherwise we're going to be back at the well appointed time that we're meant to be back till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan and.
- [54:10]
William D. Rimpel
Goodbye from me, William Srimple.
- [54:18]
Al Murray
Here's the clip we mentioned earlier.
- [54:19]
G
Hope you enjoy. But there's these absolutely incredible personal stories right in the heart of it. And I think this is what's so amazing about the Second World War. Yes, it's a Titanic event and it's the tectonic plates of history colliding and all those sort of things, isn't it? But in it there's the most amazing things that happen to individuals.
- [54:41]
Unknown
Yes.
- [54:41]
James Holland
And I think it's important that we don't lose sight of that.
- [54:43]
G
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Elena Cargan's story is absolutely incredible. So she's a 25 year old interpreter attached to 3rd Shock Army. She's drafted as a music. She wants to go to the front. She's drafted as a munitions worker, then trains as a nurse. And this reminds me of the women of soes. Someone spots that she can speak German.
- [55:01]
James Holland
That's a really good point.
- [55:02]
Unknown
Point.
- [55:02]
G
And she's been interrogating prisoners, looking at captured documents. You know, it's finally work incredibly fulfilling.
- [55:08]
James Holland
You're witnessing history, aren't you?
- [55:10]
G
You know, well, you know what's going on. I mean, that's the other thing. No one knows what's going on.
- [55:15]
James Holland
She crosses into into Germany at a checkpoint with a large, roughly constructed archway and sign that says this was the German border. There's fires and some are small, some are larger. No effort to put them out because there's no water.
- [55:28]
G
You can't basically. She says it was very difficult to find your way through the city map reading because the run out of Russian signs and the German ones have mostly disappeared along with the walls.
- [55:37]
James Holland
They push on. Streets become increasingly deserted as they close. They get to the government district. Case of bullets zipping and hissing by. More walls and buildings crashing around. They reach Potsdamer Platz. And then they kind of set themselves up in a basement of a house owned by a tailor and his family and begin the process of interrogating squealers in inverted comet. So these are captured prisoners. She says, you know, we were interested in just one thing. Where was Hitler?