Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories
Written by Amitav Ghosh
Narrated by Ranjit Madgavkar
()
About this audiobook
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China to redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the empire’s financial survival. Following the profits further, Ghosh finds opium central to the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.
Moving deftly between horticultural history, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant has had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied at the Doon School; St. Stephens College; Delhi University; Oxford University; and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alexandria. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned his doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel.In February 2004 Amitav Ghosh was appointed Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. He is married with two children and lives in New York.
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