The Rise and Fall of the Opium Trade in the Transvaal, 1904–1910

Thembisa Waetjen

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2017, vol. 43, issue 4, 733-751

Abstract: From 1904 to 1910, the transport and confinement of over 63,000 men from north-eastern China, recruited and indentured as unskilled mining labour, stimulated a new market for opium on the Witwatersrand, at the very moment when other British colonies and other empires were pushing towards co-ordinated action to curb the trade. This article plots the development and shape of opium commerce in the Transvaal colony, revealing local patterns of entrepreneurship and articulations between licit and illicit circuits in the narcotic supply chain. In a bid to monopolise control and profits, the Government set up a bureaucracy of drug provision, working with the Chamber of Mines and organised pharmacy and medicine interests. However, the continuing preference of indentured migrants for informal networks of supply, despite higher prices, points to the importance of the trade within the social and material economies of the mining compound. With political changes in both colony and metropole, and the termination of the Chinese Labour Importation scheme, the presence of opium on the Rand was drawn into the anti-opium politics of the imperial public sphere. White racial anxieties about the ‘spread’ of opium smoking were crystallised in the image of the opium den as a locus of depravity. However, it was neither moral nor social arguments, but rather the expulsion of the population officially targeted for drug use, that curtailed the trade in opium on the Witwatersrand.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2017.1309839 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:43:y:2017:i:4:p:733-751

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2017.1309839

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().