what was the British motive behind opium production in the Eastern province of India?
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Answer:
Historian William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy, a new book on the East India Company, says it "ferried opium to China, fighting the opium wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics".
Some historians have argued that the opium business bolstered India's rural economy and kept the farmers happy. That was not the case, as new research by Rolf Bauer, a professor of economic and social history at the University of Vienna, has found.
For years Dr. Bauer trawled through archival documents looking at the costs of producing opium and paying money to farmers.
He also examined an exhaustive history of the trade - the 1895 Report of the Royal Commission of Opium, which ran into seven volumes and 2,500 pages.
It contained 28,000 questions and hundreds of witness reports on the use and consumption of opium in India, and studied how the colonial government regulated its production and consumption.