How Opium Built Boston

Humanity has a fascinating relationship with poppies and their intoxicating resin, opium, with use dating back at least 1,500 years.

Many histories can be told about this plant, from its medical applications during the plague to the fortunes it sows in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia even today. Yet the history most relevant to our lives is how the opium trade built the City of Boston as it exists today and drove the industrialization of the United States.

This story begins when American merchants began trading with China in pursuit of tea in 1783. Tea had once been considered a dangerous drug and an "effiminating, poysonous vegetable" by Europeans. Yet this stimulating brew would effectively "create East-West relations" as American and British merchants became desperate to trade with China to profit from growing tea demand at home.

But trade with China was no easy feat. Americans lacked domestic sources of silver, which was the easiest commodity to exchange for tea from Chinese "Hong" merchants. In light of this challenge, Boston merchants T.H. Perkins and John Perkins Cushing began importing Turkish opium to China. This glut of opium combined with the imports of the British made it increasingly available to commoners in China — allowing the "McDonaldization" of the drug beyond narrow medical and elite use within palace walls.

The massive profits that resulted in-turn gave rise to the very framework of our global financial system today. Driven by political concerns in the United States that merchants trading with China were draining the infant nation of its currency, the Boston merchants began securing bills of exchange (effectively loans without collateral) from London Banks to expand the trade of opium. This system built the fortunes of the richest man of the era, Chinese Merchant Hoaqua, and his trust in Boston merchants. He supplied them with bailouts during financial crises and low-quality teas (winter congos) that Boston merchants dressed up in deceitfully pretty paper to dump on their fellow Americans.

Much can be said about how this opium-for-tea system devastated China. It spurred British and colonial powers to two wars to force open Chinese ports to the opium trade, leading to the massive outflow of silver from China to the West. Because the Chinese state collected taxes in silver, this outflow effectively doubled the tax rate of peasants. This in-part inspired commoners to rise up against their government in the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in human history that claimed tens of millions of lives and permanently destabilized the empire. This national embarrassment would later become a mobilizing rhetorical tool for organizing by the Chinese Community Party, and it lingers on as a rhetorical tool that President Xi deploys in speeches even today.

For the U.S., this trade built the nation. Boston's import taxes in this era alone made up a sixth of the entire nation's budget. Boston merchants became a distinctive "Brahmin" elite whose broad fortunes seeded the economy with the nation's first railroad in Massachusetts as well as countless canals and factories. T.H. Perkins funded the creation of Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, the Perkins School for the Blind, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Bunker Hill Monument. Perkins and his fellow Boston merchants also created the richest private library in the nation, the Boston Athenaeum, where the city's monied and educated elite refined their networks.

Other trades certainly played a seminal role in the wealth of Boston, the Commonwealth, and the nation as well. For example, the enslavement and trade of African peoples was a central undertaking of Harvard's presidents, and the export of manufactured cottons from the Northeast built cities like Lowell. Yet the complex opium-silver-tea economy that was backed by novel financial tools uniquely transformed capitalism, effectively laying the groundwork of globalization as it exists today.

So what does this legacy tell us that is relevant to the present?

Firstly, it speaks to the enduring principle that governments cannot uniformly or reliably ban things, even if we as a society find them harmful. Public executions were no match for the bribes paid to Chinese officials and the revenue the state received from the flow of opium commerce created an incentive to turn a blind eye to smuggling. This principle calls on us to fund public education on harmful activities and substances, not prioritize policing. It also calls on us to legitimize all commerce in a way that steers human behavior toward better outcomes, such as legalizing sports betting to a reasonable limit at a physical location where people can go for community but not allowing hyper-addictive apps to rob men blind, as just one example.

Secondly, it speaks to our amoral economic system, and it reminds us that the practice of corporations ripping people off and causing societal harm is nothing new. Robert Bennet Forbes, who took over as the defacto leader of Boston opium trade after Perkins and Cushing, often rebutted the frequent criticisms of his contemporaries who hated the opium trade by simply asserting it was a moral question he was not obligated to think about.

In his 1857 letter to U.S. Secretary of State Lewis Cass, for example, he wrote: “We must read the China question in one of two ways—first as a great moral question in which the conscience of the whole Western world and the good of China is involved. Second as a simple question of political and commercial life or decency... We cannot as a commercial community and people furnish to the question of the moral regeneration of three hundred and fifty millions of souls."

Some scholars assert that Boston merchants justified getting millions of people addicted to opium by dismissing it as akin to alcohol. However, Forbes actually asserts that no defense of either trade was even necessary at all: "no one would attempt to justify the opium trade on principle any more than they would the abuse of ardent spirits," as he wrote in his memoir. Even wealth accumulation itself did not seem to be a driver for many of the Boston opium merchants. They gave vast sums of it away (much more in relative terms than many elites do today). And many left retirement to continue working in the trade for the love of it, despite having more wealth than they could ever personally use.

The rationalization that commercial and moral questions are separate is at the core of our world's slow rot. It reminds us of the Sackler family expressing tepid remorse for its OxyContin marketing destroying millions of lives, while maintaining their fortune with a legal defense amounting to "well, business is business."

This secular belief that what one does in their occupation is exempt from moral critique has infected every occupation. Soldiers just following orders. Ticketmaster executives "almost feeling bad" for taking advantage of us, in their own words. Service agents for all matter of companies from Hertz Rent-a-car to Airbnb effectively saying "I'm sorry the company stole your money. But that's just what we do."

Our challenge, when thinking about how to create a more creative, compassionate, and healthy world is to understand what built this system and these values so that we can accelerate their change.

Growing and smuggling these plants, opium and tea, thousands of miles across the ocean with complex financial instruments speaks to humanity's ability to cooperate and innovate. We must therefore inspire people to incorporate others' well-being into our actions and moral frameworks. We must practice and elevate the belief, one demonstrably true, that the quality of our lives is inextricably tied to the quality everyone's life who calls this planet home.