Smoke and ashes : opium's hidden histories / Amitav Ghosh.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024Copyright date: ©2023Edition: First American editionDescription: 398 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- still image
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780374602925
- 0374602921
- Opium's hidden histories
- 338.4/7362293 23/eng/20231003
- HD9675.O652 G467 2024
- cat 20240305 cjk
| Cover image | Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Shelving location | Call number | Materials specified | Vol info | URL | Copy number | Status | Notes | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | Item hold queue priority | Course reserves | |
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BOOK
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Wasatch County Library Second Floor | General NonFiction | 338.4 Ghosh (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 34301002082222 |
"Originally published in 2023 by Fourth Estate, India, as Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories" --Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
Here be dragons -- Seeds -- 'An actor in its own right' -- Frenemies -- The Opium Department -- Big brother -- Visions -- Family story -- Malwa -- East and West -- Diasporas -- Boston Brahmins -- American stories -- Guangzhou -- The sea-calming tower -- Pillar of empire -- Parallels -- Portents.
"Amitav Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family-the climax of a yearslong project"--
When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. 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.
cat 20240305 cjk UPB