How opium became a powerful global commodity

There's a good chance you've encountered opium in some form, for childbirth, perhaps, or at the dentist. But how did it become such a powerful commodity? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Benjamin Robert Siegel takes Isabel King through this complex history, exploring how opium shaped capitalism, medicine, and global power. Hello, Benjamin. Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. It's great to have you here. We're here to discuss your newest book today, and your book, as the subtitle explains, is about opium capitalism and the global history of painkillers.

Before we get into the intricacies of this history, could you set the scene a little for us? You cover opium production and use mostly in the 19th and 20th centuries. But where are we in the larger story of opium? Sure. Thanks for having me. Opium is the most powerful painkiller that we have and the most significant politically and economically throughout human history. It's very old, the opium poppy, which produces opium. is first European. There's been some debate about where it was first cultivated. We think it was domesticated in Neolithic Europe, but probably for poppy seeds, which were useful either to eat or for oil, long before anyone was thinking about the sap and its narcotic or its pain killing properties. We see that first near Rome. There's evidence of opium around ancient Greece. And we take the word opos, which is plant sap, and that becomes opium in almost every language where we discuss opium. And then we see its transmission back to Asia. Arab trade routes bring opium to India and China. And then it comes back to Europe, like many kind of scientific discoveries as An ingredient in a kind of painkilling surgical cocktail used as laudanum and it's really one of

Early medicines, only reliable tools against pain, against sleeplessness, and basically any ailment that you could imagine. You produce it, it's very easy to do. Anyone can do it with the poppies, some of the poppies that they grow in their backyard. And essentially what we do today in opium production, though much of it is now chemical, is very similar to what we did a hundred or a thousand years ago. And when opium was first being cultivated, what do we know about how early societies were using it? Again, it was the frontline medicine for just about anything you could imagine. Again, if we think about medicine before what is a really modern period, the nineteenth century, human society is around the world before the advent of kind of the chemical revolutions of the late nineteenth century, we don't have that many tools. And opium is one of the few tools that Europeans And Asians, probably Africans as well, have access to. So you can use it for essentially anything. And we know that it becomes important, both in people's households. And you see evidence of children who can't sleep, of end of life care, what we would now think of as palliative care. And it becomes politically and economically important as a result. In the 16th century, the Portuguese Viceroy Albuquerque, he brings an Asian opium cultivator to Lisbon, and he says that we need to grow opium at home domestically in Portugal across Iberia because it's such a kind of powerful commodity. And all of that is before the 19th century, which we can talk about when opium becomes morphine.

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