The Opium Wars: Why Amitav Ghosh calls opium ‘an incredibly powerful agent in history’

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“Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it?,” novelist Salman Rushdie wondered in a 2008 interview. From Herodotus to Hobsbawm, the question of human agency – and how it shapes our history – has always concerned historians and philosophers. Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, Smoke and Ashes (2023), too looks at the idea of ‘agency’ in history. But rather than focusing on humans, Ghosh looks at opium as an historical agent, a seemingly innocuous plant that has shaped – and is shaping – the world we live in, forever altering the course of human history. “It’s a...