A Shared Turn: Opium and the Rise of Prohibition

Abstract

This chapter presents the guiding concepts, theoretical claims, and analytical frameworks that guide the book. It shows how colonial states came to ban opium consumption, a once permissible vice that they had taxed and justified collecting revenue from. The chapter reveals that the change was the product of longstanding tensions within the colonial bureaucracies. The everyday work of managing opium markets involved makeshift solutions to small problems that accumulated over time and escalated into large perceived challenges to the legitimacy of colonial governance. Local administrators played a key role in this process by constructing social, fiscal, and financial problems relating to opium, through their everyday work. The chapter lays out this argument in detail, while clarifying definitions of colonial vice, prohibition, and the state that the book uses throughout.