1. The Import Trade

Opium use in English society in the nineteenth century was completely unrestricted until 1868, when the first Pharmacy Act became law. The first chapters of this book will attempt to describe how such a situation of free availability and sale operated at all  levels of society over this seventy-year period, not simply in the
medical profession, who might, from a contemporary point of view, be thought the most likely legitimate users of the drug, but also among the generality of consumers, whether of the middle, lower or upper class. Opium was sold and used freely and largely unselfconsciously throughout this time, and it was imported, too, through normal channels of commerce as one more item of trade, to be dealt with as objectively as any other variety of goods to be shipped and passed through the hands of a broker. The other, very minor, source was British-grown opium, dealt with in Chapter 2.
Here too the concern was with profit and quality, not with controls or the dangers of the drug.
It might have been expected that the opium bought and sold in this way in England would come from the Far East. After all, Britain was involved in the Indian opium trade with China, to the extent of fighting two `opium wars' with that country in 1834-42 and 1856-8. But these Far Eastern connections had little effect
on English opium use until the last quarter of the century, well after the opium wars were over. The opium sold and used in England for most of the century came not from India or China, but from Turkey. In the eighteenth century, the anonymous Short History of Drug's and Other Commodities had stated that imported
opium came `chiefly ... from Turkey, where they prepare it much better than what comes from India, which is much softer and fouler than the Turkey...'.' This was still the case in the nineteenth century. For over forty years, between 1827 and 1869, between 80 and 90 per cent of opium imported into the country was Turkish. Even at the end of the century, Turkish opium still  had over 70 per cent of the market (Table 1, p. 273).
Indian opium could occasionally be found on the English market. In 1829, Dr Webster exhibited a `specimen of pure opium'  before the Westminster Medical Society, sent to him from Calcutta. Webster expressed the forthright hope that `if it could be obtained from one colony, we should have it thence rather ... than that we should go to the rascally Turks'.2 Small quantities of Indian opium were occasionally imported, and the disruption of normal channels of trade during the two `opium wars' also brought more of the drug onto the London market. Indian opium also had an increasing share of the market from the late 1880s.3 But Persian opium gained the most notable increase. It formed over 10 per cent of the total in the 1890s. Previously the Persian drug had been sent to Constantinople, where it was made up into an imitation of the Turkish variety. The new Persian variety (shipped from ports in the Persian Gulf) attracted much interest in pharmaceutical circles.' But the major proportion of imported opium at the end of the century still came from Asiatic or European Turkey.
Turkish opium was of either the Smyrna or the Constantinople variety, although in practice there appears to have been little dif ference between the two. Some opium simply found its way to Constantinople direct instead of going through the market at Smyrna, which was the central market for all the opium grown in Asia Minor. The actual opium-growing areas in the nineteenth century were chiefly in Kara Chissar and around Magnesia.5
Peasants, rather than large landowners, were the main cultivators.
The labour-intensiveness of poppy cultivation and of opium collection - a major drawback when experiments were made with British opium - made it uneconomic for large-scale production.
Every peasant who could tried to grow his own opium for sale on whatever land he owned or could rent. The whole family was pressed into service, in particular at the time of the opium harvest
Sowing of the opium poppy took place three times in one season. One acre was sown in mid-November, a second in December and the last in February or March. The plants were grown partly from white, partly from blue, seeds, and in the temperate Turkish conitions could reach a height of six or eight feet. Peasants working in the poppy fields were quite invisible as they made their incisions. The concentration together of so many opium poppies could have unusual effects

The exhalations emitted by these plantations especially in the morning and after sunset, are described by the Turks as very dangerous, and they avoid them by retiring towards evening to their huts, which they do not leave until after the rising of the sun ... As soon as the moisture of the atmosphere ... begins towards evening to be condensed, a strong narcotic smell is developed. This, in those unaccustomed to it, gives rise, in about a quarter of an hour, to headaches and nausea.6

Harvesting by the traditional incision methods took place in July in the higher areas, in May lower down the slopes. Every part of the poppy plant was used. The plants were given to the cattle, the seed pressed to produce oil used by the peasants in cooking as well as for lighting, and the remaining cake partly given to cattle, partly used by the poorer families who mixed it with their bread. Part of the seed was also sold to merchants at Smyrna, who shipped it to Marseilles where it was converted into oil used in the manufacture of soap. The peasant cultivators were under heavy obligation even before the opium was ready, for speculators and dealers had already purchased the crop. Money was advanced at high rates of interest (18 to 25 per cent was moderate) and although peasants were not obliged to give their opium to their creditors if they could find buyers at a higher price, nor were merchants compelled to take opium at the rate first fixed after the harvest if no one would take it off their hands.
Packed in grey calico bags which were then sealed and placed in oblong wicker baskets, the opium came down to Smyrna by mule, although the vagaries of opium speculation meant that it sometimes passed through the hands of three or four different merchants before it reached the port. The first baskets would
arrive there sometimes around the end of May or the beginning of June. They were sold without examination. It was only when they reached the buyer's warehouse that they were opened in front of the seller himself and a public examiner. The latter was a skilled man. The judging of opium, where colour, appearance, weight and scent all had to be taken into account, was a matter of many years' experience. Seated on the ground wearing an apron and armed
with a strong knife, he would examine the opium piece by piece as an assistant emptied each basket in turn; each one took him about ten minutes. Practice enabled him to tell by weight if the opium was pure. Any suspect piece was cut open and immediately thrown aside if adulterated. The strength and quality of the opiumwas measured on a `carat' scale, twenty-four carats being pure opium. By custom, everything over twenty was counted as pure and anything under was thrown out. This examination usually took place several weeks after the first batches of opium had arrived from the growing areas, partly because the opium, if too fresh, tended to become over-heated. It lost weight over the weeks as it dried out (damp opium always did poorly on the market) and adulteration was not so easily detected when the drug was fresh. Shipments from Smyrna began in August, and the opium was packed in hermetically sealed zinc-lined wooden cases, each one large enough to take the contents of a single basket.
In Persia, the whole process was much the same, although on a smaller scale. Here Yezd, Isfahan and some of the Khorassan districts were the main opium-growing areas. Isfahan was the centre of the opium trade - a great market place through which Persian opium passed on its way to Hong-Kong or London. Much of the Persian drug went on to the Chinese market, but already in the 1880s about a quarter of Isfahan opium was exported by London firms.
The varieties of opium were immediately distinguishable by appearance, although, as the example of Persian opium shows, it was not unknown for opium from an inferior area to be disguised in the form of one from a more highly prized district. Smyrna opium came in irregular flattened masses of around two pounds in weight. It was blackish brown, waxy and enveloped in leaves. Constantinople opium was generally found in small lens-shaped cakes, covered with poppy leaves. It was redder, softer and weaker in quality than the Smyrna type. Egyptian opium was marketed in round, flattened cakes, also enveloped in leaves. It was redder and harder than both the Turkish varieties. Persian opium came in the form of agricultural sticks, each covered in smooth glossy paper and tied with cotton. Indian opium (or at least that coming from Patna and Benares) was made into balls the size of a double fist and weighing about 3½lb. each. Again covered with a hard skin made of poppy petals, it was packed in two-storey mangowood chests, each storey with twenty compartments for twenty balls.'
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the old trading routes by which opium had long been imported into England, along with other drugs and spices, from Turkey and the Middle East, still maintained a tenuous existence." By mid-century, however, so far as opium was concerned, the last relics of the old trading company routes had disappeared and a new pattern of importing had been established. In the 1820s and 1 830s, some opium was still imported by way of the Netherlands, Gibraltar, Malta, Germany, France and, most important, Italy. These were relics of the old trading routes through Europe, centred on Venice and Leghorn. It was along these that the merchant companies had imported drugs and spices (currants in particular in the case of Turkey) in return for the goods exported there. By the 1850s, however, the bulk of the drug imported came direct from Turkey itself.
The `Italian connection' had died away and other European staging posts were of minute significance" (see Table 1, p. 273). The S.S. Crimean for instance, which went aground off Smyrna in 1865, was carrying quite considerable quantities of opium direct.10
Later in the century, alternative routes did begin to open up.
Increasing quantities of the drug were arriving by way of France in the last quarter of the century. Marseilles was becoming an important staging post in the opium trade, a historic link with its later importance as a drug `laboratory'. By the 1890s between 4 and 10 per cent of imports each year came that way; the Netherlands, too, was an important trading centre.
In the early years of the century, opium was imported through a variety of British ports. Liverpool, for instance, imported 120 lb.in 1792, Dover 261 lb. in 1801.11 But the bulk of dealing in the drug was increasingly centralized in the capital. In London, a small group of importers initially controlled the supply of opium.
These were the Turkey merchants, offshoots of the earlier Turkey, or Levant, Company, the mercantilist organization originally given its charter by Elizabeth I. This had controlled all trade to and from Turkey until the eighteenth century; its demise in 1825 left the import of opium open to free trade.12 The drug wholesaling houses were by the mid nineteenth century importing many other drugs direct, but opium at this period still remained the provinceof the Turkey merchants. Drug brokers, active in the Mincing and Mark Lane areas of the city since the seventeenth century,  were used by these merchants to conduct detailed sale negotiations.13
Many drugs were sold on the open market and auctions of  opium did take place at Garraway's Coffee House by the Royal  Exchange, the centre for London drug sales.14 But opium seems  to have been dealt with more often by private arrangement than by public auction. Most often some form of arrangement was  
agreed between the large London wholesale houses - Allen and Hanburys, the Apothecaries' Company and others - and the opium brokers.15 A representative of the wholesaler would go down to the docks to examine the opium in bond, and any suspect cases would be immediately rejected. Drug broking was an expanding occupation in early nineteenth-century London. There were only three brokers specializing in drugs and spices in the 1830s, but around thirty by the 1850s.16
The Apothecaries' Company, which had a superior status as a  body with rights both to examine in medicine and to visit apothecaries' shops (although the trading department of the Company was a separate entity), expected to be approached by the brokers themselves. Every Saturday a list was put up in the outer room of the Company's counting house giving notice of drugs needed the following week. Brokers and merchants who wished to sell to the Company sent in samples by one o'clock the following Tuesday. The Buying Committee, a group of `medical gentlemen', assisted by specialist chemists from the Company itself, then examined and tested the samples and selected the best of them."  Opium was just a commodity like so much tea.
The records for calculating the cash and profit of the opium import business - what money there was to be made - are no longer in existence. But profits were clearly sufficient for unscrupulous dealers to try to obtain a share. In the mid 1840s, one importer tried to sell completely worthless opium, but his effort did not  
meet with much success. It was offered on the market, but met with no customers -'he made it so completely worthless,' a buyer  recalled, `that its detection was not difficult.18
There was as much speculation in opium in London as there was in Smyrna. Prices could vary considerably, depending, too, on the quality of the opium purchased. Opium paid an importduty in the first half of the century. This stood at four shillings a pound between 1828 and 1836, and was reduced to one shilling a pound in 1836. It stayed at this level until, as part of the introduction of a free-trade policy, duty on the drug was completely abolished in 1860. Few reliable figures are available prior to the 1850s. Nevertheless, the gradual reduction of the opium duty did lead, at least initially, to a considerable cheapening in the wholesale price of opium. In 1819, when duty stood as high as nine shillings a pound, Turkey opium could be had at around £1 a pound  - the addition of duty brought this up to around thirty shillings a pound. In February 1819, it reached a price of twenty-seven shillings and sixpence in bond, thirty-six shillings when duty had been paid. Opium's basic price had altered little by the 1850s, but the reduction of duty to one shilling meant that it could be bought wholesale for around twenty shillings a pound. This was the price Thomas Herring gave for `common good opium'. Opium from less favoured areas could be had at a cheaper price. Egyptian opium, known to be of poor quality and generally deficient in morphine, sold in 1858 for only six shillings and eightpence a pound without duty. Times of scarcity and bad harvest could lead to a steep increase in prices, and this may have been behind the sudden rise which took place in the late 1860s when Persian opium first came directly on to the London market. Turkish opium rose to over twenty-five shillings in 1868 and higher in the succeeding year. Even Egyptian opium was around seventeen shillings and the newly arrived Persian drug sold at about £1 a pound.19  Considered in these quantities, opium was an expensive drug. Twenty shillings was an agricultural labourer's weekly wage. But it was no more expensive than other drugs on the market, and, of course, was sold and made up in ounces rather than pounds.
The question of the quantity of opium imported and consumed inside England became a matter of public discussion in the first half of the century. Import statistics are, indeed, an index of what was happening to consumption levels in the country. This point is discussed in Chapter 3. But the mechanics of opium importation, the fact that opium was just another commodity on the market, were in themselves an indication of the normality of the trade in the first six decades of the century.

references

1. 'W.B.E.', A Short History of Druggs and Other Commodities, the Produce and Manufactory of the East Indies (London, eighteenth century, exact date uncertain), p. 47.
2. `Meeting of the Westminster Medical Society', London Medical Gazette, 3 (1828-9), PP. 712-13.
3. Parliamentary Papers (P.P.), for example 1887, LXXX: Accounts and Papers. Imports and Exports of Opium, show the increase in quantities of opium from the `East Indies' (Bombay and Scinde). In 1886, over 12,000 lb. were imported into England. (See Table I, p. 272.)
4. J. Ince, `Prescriptions for examination', Pharmaceutical journal, n.s. x1(1869-70), pp. 684-5. Many other pharmacists were also enthusiastic about the new variety, as, for example, in `Persian opium', Pharmaceutical Journal, 3rd ser. 3 (1872-3), p. 31, and F. A. Fluckiger and D. Hanbury, Pharmacographia. A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin, Met with in Great Britain and British India (London, Macmillan, 1879), P. 49
5. The description of opium growing and the opium market in Asia Minor owes much to the descriptions given in, for example, Landerer, `On the preparation of Smyrna opium', Pharmaceutical journal, so (1850-51), PP. 474-5; S. H. Maltass, `On the production of opium in Asia Minor', Pharmaceutical Journal, r4 (1854-5), PP. 395-400; E. R Heftier, `Notes on the culture of and commerce in opium in Asia Minor', Pharmaceutical Journal, n.s. to (1868-9), pp. 434-7; P. L. Simmonds, `Supplies of opium and scammony from Turkey', Pharmaceutical journal, 3rd ser. 2 (1871-2), PP. 986-7
6. Landerer, op. cit., pp. 474-5
7. Descriptions of the appearance of the various varieties of opium are given in Landerer, op. cit., pp. 474-5; J. Murray, A System of Materia Medica and Pharmacy (Edinburgh, Adam Black, 6th edn 1832), p. 82; and `Opium', Household Words, r6 (1857), pp. 104, 181.
8. Although there are no reliable import figures for the earlier centuries, there is evidence that opium was available in England in the late sixteenth century. R. S. France, op. cit., p. 5o, shows that Zacharie Linton, the apothecary in question, had half an ounce of opium among his drugs in 1593.
9. The decline of European staging posts can be traced in the published import/export data. 1857 was the last year in which any notable amounts of opium came other than direct from Turkey; see P.P. 1857-8, L IV: Accounts and Papers. Imports and Exports of Opium, p. 89.
10. Greater London Record Office, Records of Smith Kendon Ltd 1865, statements about the S.S. Crimean, Ms B/SK/26. The listing of cases of opium along with bales of madder and bags of gum indicated the normality of the trade.
11. P.P. 18o8, XII: Accounts and Papers. Trade: Imports and Exports of
Opium, pp. 5o-51, 88-9.
12. I. S. Russell, The Later History of the Levant Company, 17531825 (unpublished University of Manchester Ph.D. thesis, 1935); A. C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London, O.U.P., 1935).
13. Herring's evidence on this point was given to P.P. 1854-5, VIII: First Report from the Select Committee on the Adulteration of Food, Drink and Drugs; see also G. E. Trease, Pharmacy in History (London, Bailliere, Tindall, and Cox, 1964), p. 156.
14. J. H. Heap, `The commerce of drugs', Pharmaceutical journal, n.s. 16 (1903), P. 529
15. P.P. 1854-5, op. cit.
16. Robsons London Directory (London, William Robson, 12th edn 1832), p. 155; Post Office London Directory (London, Kelly, 1855).
17. P.P. 1854-5: Report from the Select Committee on Adulteration, op. cit.
18. Evidence given by Professor Thomas Redwood to the Select Committee on Adulteration, P.P. 1854-5, op. cit., q. 1762-5. See also `The opium robbery', Pharmaceutical journal, n.s. 4 (1862-3), pp. 327-8
19. Information on prices is taken from London Price Current, 1819-182o, Pharmaceutical Society Ms. 12381; and for example P.P. 186o, LXIV: Accounts and Papers. Imports and Exports of Opium.