loppear reviewed Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh
Straighter than my Ghosh favorites
3 stars
A clear history of opium trade's encouragement, enforcement, and implications, mostly India to China under British imperial control but with heavy threads of American exploitation and wealth laundering up to our current opioid crisis. Entangled slightly with more-than-human agency and literary overlap with Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy historical events, I found this straighter history and less mentally rearranging than I expected.