Brian Inglis appears to be a fascinating character, an Anglo-Irish historian and journalist with a deep interest in psychic phenomenon and alternative medicine. His estate, he died in 1997, has made many of his books available on Kindle Unlimited, and at the price of "free" I decided to take a chance.

The Opium War is one of the darker moments in Britain's imperial history, and seeing the military aspects as tedious due to Britain's massive military superiority, Inglis chooses to focus on the politics. In the early 19th century, India was ruled by the English East India Company, which due to decades of exploitative mismanagement was had impoverished the land. Meanwhile, rising English demand for tea, and lack of demand for British manufactured goods in China, presented a problem. The only British good, aside from silver itself, that could be traded was opium. The EIC established an opium monopoly, turning the best agricultural land in India into poppy plantations, and then through a shifting series of private smugglers, proceeded to send the goods into China through the port of Canton. As addictioned turned to an epidemic, Chinese authorities responded by cracking down on the trade, destroying millions of pounds of opium in a mass seizure. This provided the impetus for the war itself, which England handily won.

Inglis is no Dalrymple, and this tale of colonialism gone wrong is dry and somewhat confusing. The best parts are the acid irony by which English authorities use the novel theories of political economy developed by Smith and Ricardo to justify a government monopoly on the production of opium, and also the free trade absolutism which prohibited any Chinese restrictions on the dangerous drug. Goose and gander etc. The last chapter of analysis is worth the book, but it's a long road there.