Opium and the Regulation of Vice: British Burma, 1870-1900

• In Event: For Love, Money or Drugs: Policing Illicit Activities in Colonial Southeast Asia

Abstract

In 1894, Burma under British rule became the first European colony in Southeast Asia to officially ban opium consumption. Prohibition was a novel development, not least as it began at a time when colonial knowledge of opium's dangers for "natives" was yet tenuous and empires still defended the commercial life of as a peculiar source of "Asiatic" revenue. What explains Burma's early turn against opium? This paper argues that colonial administrators on the ground are central to understanding this shift. My focus is upon how officials on the ground conceptualized opium problems and their commonplace philosophies on vice. Occupied with banal, everyday tasks of bureaucratic management, these actors developed situated explanations of what threatened local order—what dangers, what challenges, what wickedness marred the colonial world. Local administrators were weak actors with surprisingly strong powers, I contend, as they influenced the nature of anti-opium reforms through the production of such on-site knowledge. Using evidence from public records and private writings of officials from the Burma Commission, Excise, and Financial Departments in Burma from the 1870s until the 1900s, I trace both the anxieties aroused by perceived problems of illicit opium markets and vice crime, and the economic realities that constituted their material basis.

Author

• Diana Kim, Harvard University