Opium trade rife in early R.I. history

Rhode Island merchants played a major role in the American slave trade, financing some 1,000 trips to Africa.

But Providence businessmen and slavers, including John Brown, also made money from another unsavory practice after the Revolution: the opium trade.

Although opium was used as both medicine and a drug elsewhere, it was illegal in China, where merchants from Philadelphia, New York and New England made money selling the banned drug.

Relying on their skills as coastal privateers, slave traders and even patriots, Americans “became masters of opium smuggling along the China coast,” said history professor Sucheta Mazumdar at Brown University on Monday.

The Duke University professor spoke as part of a yearlong symposium called “Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History.”

According to Mazumdar and other scholars, American merchants played a significant role in developing new sources of opium and expanding the market from the late 1700s to 1850.

Although Americans traded in other Chinese goods, including tea, silk and porcelain, “what made opium profitable was the fact that it was a smuggled item,” said Mazumdar in a speech titled “Slaves, Textiles and Opium: The Other Half of the Triangular Trade.”

Back in America, the profits from the trade generated money for mansions, banks, railroads and textile mills, she said.

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