Carl A. Trocki

Opium and the Beginnings of Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia

This paper deals with the relationship between opium revenue farming and the development of capitalist enterprises in Southeast Asia. It examines the role which opium played in the transformation of all Asian economies during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While few would argue that the unprecedented expansion of the opium trade by European traders had a major, usually destructive impact on Asian economic systems and political and social institutions, the long term results of opium in the Asian, particularly in the Southeast Asian economies is less well understood. Most specifically, the opium farming systems, which existed in, virtually every Southeast Asian state (as well as parts of China and India) were important adjuncts of capitalist development in the region.

Development of Labour Organisation in Singapore, 1800-1960

This article explores the early history of labour unions in Singapore, beginning from the early twentieth century. It focuses on the thesis that the labour movement in Singapore was generally attacked because it was claimed that the union leaders had political agendas that went beyond simple economic demands. This alleged political involvement generally left the movement vulnerable to suppression when the colonial government and later the PAP government chose to attack the unions.

Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World . By David T. Courtwright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 277.

During the past few decades a number of scholars have begun exploring a new range of questions regarding drugs and the drug trade. David Courtwright has been foremost in developing what might be understood as the “new history of drugs.†This slim volume is a tour de force of this approach, a sophisticated analysis of an extremely complex historical phenomenon. His simple and elegant style is suitable for the general reader, an undergraduate, or a specialist. Courtwrights study of the relationship between human beings, Western civilization, and our retinue of psychoactive substances is a penetrating overview of the global panorama during the past five centuries.

24.95, paper.

1. Introduction: imposing the Empire 2. State statistics and corporeal reality: problems of epidemiology and evidence 3. Biology, medical ideas and the social context of illness 4. Public health and the pathogenic city 5. Sickness and the world of work: the men on the estates 6. Brothel politics and the bodies of women 7. Domestic lives: reproduction, the mother and the child 8. Conclusion: the moral logic of colonial medicine.