248. Victorian Narcos: Sex, Drugs, & The Opium Agency (Ep 2)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arland. And me, William Zurimpool. Very good. Now, if you missed the first episode, what we have been talking about is the relationship of opium and cups of tea. Not an obvious one necessarily.

Well, I mean, I don't I don't know how many of the people walk their dogs out there in a no age sipping cups of tea. Bit novel to us. Um, but but we were talking in the last episode about how tea had become such an overwhelming desire and product uh for the British. The the British loved it so much, they were buying so much of it, they were spending so much money on it.

90% of cargo was tea. And so there's suddenly this thought that hang on a minute, all of our money is leaving us to go to China and they're not buying anything from us. And now this will sound quite familiar to anyone who's been listening, as William pointed out last episode, to the kind of conversations going on about Trump tariffs. You know, that if there isn't a balance of payments, how is this fair? And that starts occurring.

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