East India Companies

Lucrative, expanding tea trade with China became a world monopoly of the East India Company. When the treaty between Britain and China expired in 1833, location of alternate tea sources became desirable. All attempts to cultivate the relatively superior Chinese varieties in India failed. However, local cultivation of the Assam variety indigenous to northeast India was promising, and eventually allowed tea production in India to flourish. India became one of the foremost tea growing areas of the world,7 only recently being surpassed in export by Kenya. 

For the countries of Europe, opium was a critical product for trade with the countries of the Far East. The problem for the Europeans (a problem Americans eventually encountered as well) was that while they increasingly required goods from the Far East, such as tea and especially silk, countries like China were not equally interested in Western goods. But the Chinese were interested in opium, an interest that provided Europe with the leverage for effective trade. For Europeans, especially the British, this meant that they had to control the trade in places where opium could be grown, such as India. This need for control lead to the creation of Britain s infamous East India Company. 

Boric acid was first prepared in 1702 by Willem Homberg. He was bom on January 8, 1652, at Batavia on the island of Java. When his father left the service of the Dutch East India Company, the family settled in Amsterdam, where young Wilhelm (or Willem) had a much better opportunity to study than in the torrid climate of the East Indies. After studying law at Jena and Leipzig, he was admitted to the bar in Magdeburg in 1674. Soon becoming more interested in the laws of nature than in those devised by man, he began to devote much time to botany, astronomy, and mechanics. 

The Dutch East India Company (VCO) ruthlessly and efficiently operated a monopoly. For example, in 1735, the VCO burned half a million kg of nutmeg in Amsterdam in an attempt to raise prices. In Indonesia, the Dutch would torch plantations if new growers tried to enter the market or if established growers tried to smuggle their products to non-Dutch traders. 

It is hard to overemphasise the impact of the consumption of opium on China in the nineteenth century. Before this trade began, China was a proud, self-sufficient, technologically and scientifically advanced nation (some have claimed China was often 4-7 centuries in advance of the European nations in these respects). By the end of the nineteenth century China was weakened to the extent that it was hard to govern, impoverished and technologically surpassed by its neighbour Japan, North America and the European nations. The roots of its troubled history in the twentieth century could be said to lie in the soil of Bengal where the East India Company grew its opium. 

Sir William Brooke O Shaughnessy introduced Indian hemp to the West in 1839. William Brooke O Shaughnessy entered the service of the East India Company in 1833 as assistant surgeon. He studied the botany and chemistry of herbs used in oriental medicine and incorporated some into his edition of the Bengal Pharmacopoeia published in 1842. One of these herbs was cannabis, or Indian hemp. His medical treatise recommended an extract from the plant for patients with rabies, cholera, tetanus, and infantile convulsions. Until the end of the 19th century prominent physicians of Europe and North America advocated cannabis extracts for the prevention and symptomatic treatment of migraine headache. 

Portugese traders with routes to the East China Sea smoked opium with tobacco in long-stemmed pipes. They reintroduced the practice to the Chinese who had frowned on its use. The British East India Company... 

East India Company intelligence operative Adam Smith s Wealth of Nations spelled out the colonial looting policy against which the Founding Fathers rebelled. In that same document — as part of the same scheme to defend the Empire — Smith advocated a massive increase of East India Company opium exporting into China. (2)... 

The "Secret Committee" of the East India Company — under the direction of Lord Shelburne and company chairman George Baring — coordinated British secret intelligence s campaign of subversion and economic warfare against the newly constituted American republic even before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Paris (1783). (3)... 

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