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Flower power
罂粟花的力量
The history of the opium trade helps explain the modern world.
鸦片贸易的历史有助于解释现代世界。
The opium poppy looks delicate and innocuous. But for Amitav Ghosh, an Indian writer, it is “one of the most powerful beings that humans have encountered in their time on Earth”.
罂粟花看起来娇弱无害。但对于印度作家阿米塔夫·戈什来说，罂粟却是“人类在地球上遇到的最强大的生物之一”。
Mr Ghosh’s elegant history of the plant’s influence is both a tribute to what he calls “the historical agency of botanical matter” and a reckoning with the imperial past.
戈什的这本历史书文笔优雅，讲述了罂粟产生的影响，既是对“植物的历史作用”的致敬，也是对过去帝国主义的清算。
The book’s origins lie in his trilogy of “Ibis” novels, set in the thick of the opium trade in the 1830s. The research Mr Ghosh carried out while writing them prompted him to probe how the drug trade shaped free-market capitalism and globalisation.
这本书发端于他的三部曲小说《艾比斯》，小说设定在19世纪30年代鸦片贸易的高峰期。戈什在写这些故事时进行的研究促使他去探索这场毒品贸易如何塑造了自由市场的资本主义和全球化。
Opium has been prized as a sedative for 5,000 years. Mr Ghosh’s account begins with Catherine of Braganza marrying King Charles II in 1662. Her dowry included a casket of Chinese tea and some small islands off India’s west coast.
鸦片作为珍贵的镇静剂已经有5000年的历史了。戈什的叙述始于1662年葡萄牙布拉干萨王朝的凯瑟琳公主嫁给了英国国王查尔斯二世。凯瑟琳公主的嫁妆包括一盒中国茶叶和印度西海岸的一些小岛。
The fashion for tea simmered quickly in Britain, with the East India Company (EIC) controlling its import. The EIC funnelled goods to China from India.
随着东印度公司控制了茶叶的进口，喝茶的风尚在英国迅速升温。东印度公司从印度向中国运送货物。
An appetite for one of these, cotton, was already strong. But the EIC began coercing Indian farmers to grow a different crop that, used recreationally, would turn countless people into addicts.
中国对其中一种货物——棉花——的需求已经很大了。但东印度公司开始强迫印度农民种植另一种作物，这种作物如果用于娱乐，会让无数人染上毒瘾。
Europeans did not invent the opium trade. Rather, they expanded modest local practices into a rapacious global enterprise. Mr Ghosh argues that the Dutch created the first “imperial narco-state” in the 17th century.
欧洲人不是发明了鸦片贸易。而是将小规模的当地买卖扩展为贪婪的全球企业。戈什认为，荷兰人在17世纪创建了第一个“帝国主义毒品国家”。
The model was “perfected by the British”, who promoted the convenient myth that “non-white people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity”. When China banned the import of opium in 1729, the British turned to smugglers who called themselves “private traders”.
这一模式“由英国人进行完善”，英国人借此推广了“非白人天生容易染上毒瘾和堕落”这一利于他们的谣言。中国在1729年禁止鸦片进口，于是英国人转而求助于那些自称“私营商贩”的走私者。
Most of the characters he depicts are venal. One exception is Lin Zexu, a Chinese civil servant.
戈什描绘的大多数人物都是贪污腐败的。其中有一个例外，就是中国的公务员林则徐。
In 1839 he complained in an undelivered letter to Queen Victoria that opium traders were “perfectly careless about the injuries they inflict” in their “inordinate thirst after gain”.
1839年，他在给维多利亚女王的一封未送达的信中抱怨说，鸦片商人在“对利益的过度渴求”中，对“他们造成的伤害完全不在乎（贪利之极，不顾害人）”。
