Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories by - Amitav
Ghosh
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an
excursion into history, both economic and cultural. Ghosh traces the
transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well
as on the world at large. Engineered by the British Empire, which exported opium
from India to sell in China, the trade and its revenues were essential to the
Empire's survival. Upon deeper exploration, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of
some of the world's biggest corporations, several of America's most powerful
families and institutions, and contemporary globalism itself. In India the
long-term consequences were even more profound.
Moving deftly between
horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and
cultural repercussions of colonialism, Smoke and Ashes reveals the pivotal role
one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know it - a world
that is now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
About the Author
Amitav Ghosh
was born in Calcutta, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; he studied
in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of several acclaimed works of
fiction and non-fiction including The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry
Tide, the Ibis Trilogy (comprising the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and
Flood of Fire), Gun Island, The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse, Jungle
Nama and The Living Mountain. Amitav Ghosh's work has been translated into more
than thirty languages. He has been awarded and felicitated across the world. In
2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers
of the past decade. The same year, the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary
honour, was conferred on him: he was the first English-language writer to
receive it.
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