After the mid-18th century, when the British East India Co. was importing tea from China, few could have guessed that the industry would be revolutionized by a different plant: the opium poppy. Over ...

Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s new novel, Smoke and Ashes, traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, China and America, as well as on the world at large. (Photo: Twitter) ...

It takes some daring to choose opium as your historical protagonist. The milky sap of the poppy flower has taken so many forms across so many centuries that its allure feels like a trap, a chasing of ...

Bestseller Ghosh (The Great Derangement) offers up a scintillating and kaleidoscopic vision of opium’s role in the past several centuries of global history. Centered mainly on events leading to the ...

I WISH I had seen those days, those wonderful hundred days when the armies of America and Britain with its Dominions and the French stormed on to their goal, the battle of August 8 which Ludendorff ...

Around 2 a.m. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a "posse of police" led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James ...

IT MIGHT SEEM surprising that in late 19th century Jefferson County, as well as in the rest of the United States, buying, possessing and using opium and its derivative products such as morphine and ...

Testifying before the California Senate's Special Committee on Chinese Immigration the year after Douglass' raid, another San Francisco police officer, George W. Duffield, averred that "ninety-nine ...