As official residences go, Sir John Henry Rivett-Carnac’s company home was, as he wrote in his memoirs, “a quite magnificent house on the Ganges at Ghazipur, surrounded by a good garden and fine grounds.” Indoors it boasted a billiards room and the finest collection of paintings in India.
The foundations of this major job perk was the Benares Opium Agency that Sir John headed from 1876. Other perks included the all-paid-for option to escape to the Indian hills with his family and staff during the hot summers. When the poppy growing season got under way in November, Sir John would embark on a grand regional tour, interspersing inspections of opium farms with shooting expeditions and visits to colourful bazaars.
The penniless Indian farmers under his watch, who fed Ghazipur’s opium processing factory, knew no such comfort. They were coerced into cultivating the crop to supply the Chinese market and fill British coffers. In effect, the British empire became a narco-state, argues Amitav Ghosh in Smoke and Ashes, a propulsive and revelatory history of how opium, a tool of colonial capitalism, was used to pummel India, corrupt China and prop up empire.