Tradition · opium trade landscape · India
Patna opium & Company trade
The Patna opium cultivation and Company trade landscape — the East India Company's monopoly opium cultivation in Bihar (Patna, Shahabad, Bhagalpur districts) and the opium trade to Qing China that financed the British conquest of India. The Company established the Patna Opium Monopoly in 1773 under Warren Hastings, forcing Bihari peasants into opium cultivation at fixed low prices and processing the raw opium at the Patna Opium Agency and the Ghazipur Opium Factory (established 1820, still the world's largest state-run opium factory). The Patna opium was shipped to Canton (Guangzhou) in China, triggering mass addiction and the 1839-42 and 1856-60 Opium Wars. The 1839 Lin Zexu confiscation of 20,000 chests of Indian opium at Canton began the First Opium War, which forced China's 1842 Treaty of Nanking (ceding Hong Kong). The Patna opium trade financed the East India Company's conquest of India through its revenue stream (30-40% of Company revenue in 1830s).
- Date
- 1770–1910
- Function
- Trade & production
- Patron dynasty
- Company
- Condition
- historic trade system
- Material
- opium
- River basin
- Ganga
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.610, 85.140
Connections (4)
- Trade routeMagen David Synagogue, Kolkata
The Baghdadi Jews came to Calcutta and Bombay with the trade the Company had built — opium from Patna and Malwa to Canton, then cotton, indigo and jute — and the Sassoons ran a large part of it. David Sassoon's family moved from Baghdad to Bombay in the 1830s and within two generations were building synagogues, libraries, docks and schools in a city they had reached as refugees.
- Trade routeAssam tea, Jorhat
Britain bought Chinese tea with Bengal opium because it had nothing else China wanted, and grew Assam tea from the 1830s to stop having to buy Chinese tea at all. The two commodities are one policy: the opium monopoly existed to close a trade deficit, and the Assam plantations existed to make the monopoly unnecessary. Both outlived their purpose by decades.
- AnalogueChamparan indigo landscape
Indigo in north Bihar and opium around Patna were grown in the same districts under the same device: an advance paid to a cultivator who then had to plant a fixed acreage at a fixed price, whatever the market did. When synthetic indigo destroyed the price after 1897 the obligation remained, and Champaran in 1917 is what that produced.
- Site adjacencyPatna Sāhib
The Patna opium trade centred on the East India Company's Opium Agency and the Gulzaribagh godowns on the Ganges waterfront, downstream of the Patna Sāhib takht; both are features of Patna city but the opium trade belongs to its colonial waterfront rather than inside the Sikh takht.
Sources
East India Company records; histories of the Bengal opium monopoly and Asian trade.
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