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Comment by clock_tower | Hacker News Reader

From your tone, it sounds like this is a known controversy in India. Could you elaborate?

I know nothing about the Tatas' origin, although it's hard to miss the importance of the modern Tata Group. Wikipedia says that the family fortune was founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who had some wealth from his father Nusserwanji and parleyed it, through trade, into enough capital to recondition a cotton mill.

Are you saying that Jamsetji's trading company dealt in opium? That his father's business was involved in it? Or even both? If so, looking at things from a United States perspective, I'd find that a little heartening. I'd always seen the opium trade as a matter of pumping money from undeveloped China to already-rich London and Boston; if there was going to be an opium-for-silver trade regardless, at least some of the silver went to somewhere else in need of capital.

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I assume your response was addressed to the parent post? I didn't think I was passing any judgement on the Tatas. I was asking why the Tata name was brought up in the first place.

I misread the tone of your post, then; "Can you shed some more light on why the Tatas should be mentioned in the article?" and "I am really curious about the Tata family role in this that you allude to. Please elaborate." made it sound like you knew what the answer would be, at least from my perspective.

Amazing. I wonder how many people have been offended at things I've written in the past due to misunderstanding of tone. From my perspective, and not saying you're wrong at all, that comment wasn't even close to how you describe (again not saying you're wrong).

> I'd always seen the opium trade as a matter of pumping money from undeveloped China to already-rich London and Boston;

Like most things, it's a little more complicated than the packaged narrative. Prior to the introduction of opium to the Canton trade, pretty much all of the goods that were imported from China by foreigners were paid for with silver - mostly from Mexico and Potosi or Japan - as there was very little that Europeans could find or produce that would sell in China's largely self-sufficient economy[1]. By the late 1700s, Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands were shipping millions of silver Dollars into Canton for silks and tea and such every year. China vacuumed up so much of the world's silver supply that it severely distorted the exchange rates in the Qing bimetallic currency system. Up until the opium trade got going, China had a massive, massive trade surplus. A lot of that wealth did get squandered - probably the poster child would be Heshen[2], a Manchu official that siphoned off a fortune estimated at fifteen times the annual tax revenue of the Qing Empire, or Wu Bingjian - one of the primary Chinese merchants in the Cohong system, who was so wealthy he personally contributed a third of the indemnity stipulated in the Treaty of Nanking[3].

[1] I don't have a link, but it is hilarious reading some of the early official records of the English East India company, and their utter inability to find anyone who would buy the woolens they initially tried shipping as cargo.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen#Fall_of_Heshen

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howqua

I'm familiar with this; but by the 1840s-1850s, China was sending out more silver for opium than they were taking in for tea. That's the period I refer to when I'm talking about the opium trade as a wealth pump.

Yes...this is a pretty concise history of the situation, but I feel it needs at least a passing mention of one of the "evilest" government-sponsored wars in the history of mankind, the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century.

What made these particular acts of aggression so odious was, as I discovered in shock several years ago, they were not fought for the obvious reasons you would think; that the Chinese has opium and the British sent some military to take it from them. The reality is much more hideous then that.

As the previous poster mentioned, the British had little the Chinese wanted to trade for, and the Brits wanted Chinese tea in huge quantities. What the British eventually settled on was Afghanistan opium, which the Chinese had a taste for. The problem started when the Chinese leaders, seeing the destruction that opium addiction was doing to their people, tried to stop the trade of opium and reign in the millions of ruined lives it was causing.

The British responded, rather poorly I'd say, by going to war with the Chinese to force them to continue to trade the opium for the tea and thusly keep their people enslaved to the drug. It's a rather unbelievable premise for going to war actually, but in 1839 that's what they did.

They won, thus insuring several more generations of totally ruined Chinese addicts. I always think that this pretty much represents government and big business working in tandem at its most evil worse.

I understand opium going from India to China, then tea going from China to Britain... but what are the Indians buying? Don't the Brits have the same problem in India that they had in China?

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