Flowers in the Blood by Jeff Goldberg

Author:Jeff Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781628738995
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

It is definitely arranged that the article is to be legalised subject to a duty. . . . This will not come into operation until the new tariff does, which may not be for some months yet. The immediate effect should be to increase demand for the drug rather than otherwise, but it will no doubt also encourage the growth of native poppy.

Sure enough, within a year the merchants of Swatow were discovered to be sophisticating good Jardine-Matheson Malwa with inferior Chinese opium. More ominous yet, buyers for the Swatow Opium Guild were booking steamship passage to Calcutta and speculating on opium at the auction block. Dismal times were at hand for Jardine-Matheson.

They were getting pressed out of the trade at both ends of the connection now. In previous years Jardine-Matheson had enjoyed the nimblest and most well-armed merchant fleet in the China Seas, and offered to other merchants the singular advantage of having their cargos underwritten by the Bengal Insurance Company. With the 1850 opening of the Peninsular and Oriental steamship line, all these advantages were lost. David Sasoon and Sons now effectively enjoyed a fleet fully equal to the Red Rover and her expensive sisters, and anon there were spacious Sasoon factories in all the treaty ports besides Amoy. And the Sasoons were much closer with the Indian producers than Jardine-Matheson could ever be.

The Sasoons had a pedigree stretching back before the sixteenth century, when the Inquisition had run them out of Spain for being Jewish. David Sasoon’s father, Shaykh Sasoon ben Salih, had prospered so mightily as a merchant banker in Turkey that the local Pasha had several times jailed him for no other reason than to extort ransom from the family. David, the firm’s prolific patriarch—he had twin sons and a grandson on the same day in 1841, at age forty-eight—set up operations in Rajputana, Central India, in the thirties, just as the Malwa growers commenced wholesale opium exports, and the Honourable Company’s monopoly was opened up to independent investors.

Unlike Jardine-Matheson, the Sasoons exploited the post-Company laissez faire bonanza with an eye toward the long term, and never specialized in opium to the point of neglecting any other commodity that could turn a profit, however slim and chancy. When most of the other traders stepped out of the Indian cotton business, the Sasoons made a point of rescuing impoverished Indian growers with loans for seed money, and in this way they cut out the necessity of dealing with producers thirdhand through Bombay. In the fullness of time, when the Sasoon-supported cotton growers found they couldn’t sell enough of the crop to make the loan interest, David and Sons were in a choice position to suggest alternative tillage. They would even advance money for the necessary opium development: irrigation, soil enrichment, dung and hordes of migrant harvesters at culling season. By and by, whole districts of the Native States were under poppy contracted to David Sasoon and Sons for harvests years in the future.

“Silver and gold, silks,

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