I saw recently an educator I've respected for a long time extolling the great learning value of novels and fiction writing over non-fiction. Learners identify with characters better than analytical frameworks.
I've recognized something like this before as a weakness in my own career as a high school classroom teacher. I recall a student complaint once that I wasn't giving enough attention to the characters and "pageantry" of history. You know, the legendary heroes and ceremonial grandeur of history. Let's re-enact the characters signing the Magna Carta-- which might be a very good idea, by the way-- but not my teaching strength, for sure. Anyway, I know the nearly universal approval of, if not kindly tolerance for, my own classroom teaching style, for which I will always be grateful, is mostly attributable to student approval of me, a person, a personable character, school teacher, Mr. Thompson, far more than any appreciation for my content lessons in world history.
A breakdown of my own reading over the years, with minor variations at one time or another, is probably something like 50% non-fiction histories or social science-y books (with big bias for left populist critical theory), 25% books about popular music, and 25% novels or fiction. Accordingly, the juice in my own classroom teaching largely came from my enthusiasm for big picture social science-y takes on world history, political economy, economic trends, political power structures, cultural and sociological movements, big periodizing shifts in history: Bronze Age, Columbian Encounter, Industrial Revolution, Colonialism and Imperialism. I always tended to neglect the character-driven war stories and great men anecdotes; the general pageantry of kings and queens and their courts. The game of thrones. (1)
Character-driven narratives were never my strength in my own teaching but that didn't mean I didn't like them. I developed a big taste for historical fiction in books and movies and TV series once I started teaching, including now podcasts, more background stuff to read or look at while immersing myself in whatever historical time period.
Partly my predilection for big picture/Big History takes on world history is attributable to my limited brain powers. I found it far easier to hold onto the big structural outlines and questions than the scholarly details, names and dates, and particular biographical anecdotes and stories. But I also undoubtably gravitated towards the big picture stuff, the class analysis, the never-ending conspiracy of the rich against the poor, because my own origins are working class (non-college educated working class parents and grandparents, both sides) and the social justice stuff turned me on. Touched some built-in familial pride in me. I've never had any doubts that there is a class war going on, the systematic oppression of common working people, I saw it around me growing up and I recognized it immediately in history. Nor have I ever had any doubt about whose side I am on in the class war. If there are working class whites, including many in my extended family, that have been taken in by Trump's con it is they who have abandoned the side of working people. Not me. My reading of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States in the late 1980s was a big awakening for me, a big Woke moment, and probably had as much to do with my getting into school teaching as any other book I've ever read. In short, I was teaching CRT in the public schools long before this fascist anti-Woke thing took over the country. And I always liked Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse, vilified by conservative bullies like Christopher Rufo, going way back.
Nevertheless, I have also always liked pop culture and novels and, especially once I began classroom teaching, character-driven historical fiction. So while I was lecturing in my tedious power-point bullet-point breakdown style for all those years (and which I truthfully and mercifully always strove to keep to a minimum) I actually developed quite a taste for good historical fiction. Good, meaning, believable or convincing characters and material conditions. My standards for believable or convincing were not literary or scholarly, of course. They were more public education generalist fan-boy of popular literary scholarship, with a big streak of lifelong fan-boy critic of the popular arts.
I draw the line with 90% of the costume dramas Hollywood produced in its golden age, 1940s to 1960s, for instance. Stagy and dead like museum dioramas. And basically unwatchable, or typically appreciated only for their camp pretensions. Which sweepingly dismisses museums and theater and the golden age of cinema, which isn't my intention or even without exception close to true. My point: There is a textural reality to the material conditions that I respond to; a grit, a realistic material texture to the history that I need to find in my historical fiction, book or movie. If it is there, this convincing historical visual or textural feel, it is often enough for me, even when the literary and/or dramatic standards of the characters is maybe a little lacking, or otherwise pretty cheesy or lousy. This goes for books or movies. Although the stiff, cardboard, predictable character problem might be a bigger weakness in TV/movies than books, or I've encountered more or it in TV/movies anyway.
Anyway, my appreciation for the convincing material reality of historical fiction is hardly scholarly. I'm vibing off whatever I've read about whatever history, responding to a visualization that is more imaginative and stylized than documentary. Although I'm applying some standards of verisimilitude I've internalized from the books I've read and the movies I've watched. My big hot take on the historical fiction scene, such as I know of it-- very limited-- is that there's way too much of it set in Europe and about the game of thrones stuff, dynastic monarchy succession wars, endless fratricide, a small court, probably 3-5% of the population max, vie for a secure place in the monopoly control of violent power, everyone else, "the little people" in Game of Thrones, the rest scrounge out an existence and try to stay out of the way and not be firebombed by the Queen's dragons. The politics of game of thrones is drearily familiar to politics today, unfortunately. But I often prefer historical fiction that brings to life and believably imagines the complex texture of other historical worlds, outside medieval Europe.
River of Smoke (2011): This story is set in Canton, China, in the 13 Factories, the epicenter of the First Opium War, 1839-1842, and so in respect to the setting the most cinematic of the trilogy. This is the Pearl River Delta, the confluence of three great rivers, opening into the South China Sea; an area today that includes Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton), Schenzhen, Hong Kong and a Greater Bay Area urban conglomeration of 70 million people. The Pearl River Delta is a bustling southern port connecting China to SE Asia and the Indian Ocean Trade Network and the middle east, going back to the earliest centuries of the common era. River of Smoke is a complex portrait of this coastal trading port city and region at a specific point in this long history. The 19th century, 1830s, on the eve of the Opium Wars. And, specifically, it's about how the imperial state of China, the Qing Dynasty, has since the mid-18th century tried to restrict the increasingly disruptive forces of foreign trade to this port region with a system of trade known as the Canton Factories; or 13 Factories, which by the time of the Opium Wars numbered more like 17 or 18 factories. They weren't really factories in the sense we think of factories as buildings enclosing manufacturing operations. The different factories were like embassies or compounds based on the national origin of the trade: British (EIC), Dutch (VOC), American, French, Spanish, etc. They were trading posts: big port warehouses in the ground floor, with second floor living quarters for the foreign traders. And these factories were where these foreigners were supposedly for the most part physically restricted. Local Chinese merchants, rich and well connected, served as factory hosts or landlords. For all the restrictions, however, there are a handful of British and American traders, known affectionately as "Canton graduates," making huge dynastic fortunes of wealth from selling opium to China via the factory system. And then around them swirls a wildly diverse network of characters caught up in the trade in opium and interactions with the factories: foreign traders, local Chinese merchants, agents of the EIC, local boat people, adventuring (if not desperate) zamindars from India, lascars from the vast Indian Ocean Trade Network, fugitive indentured laborers (read: contractual slaves, basically), a mixed-race American, European botanical scholars. It's a complex menagerie of peoples. All trying to profit from and/or live with this terrible trade. And all living and working amidst many tens of thousands, 90% plus of the population (2), trying to survive this hurly-burly of commerce, if not suffer enslavement to it. The Dan people (or Tanka), a local people indigenous to the Pearl River Delta, have been barred by imperial China, the Qing, from building on land, and live and do their business on islands of small boats or junks in the tens of thousands (boats and people) tied together and floating in the river. Forming a floating island of a Red Light district of opium dens and brothels and cheap labor and links to illegal trade. Scorned by local Cantonese landlubbers, with the possible exception of the Chinese merchants (and foreign traders, of course) who employ and profit off them. The main action of the story is the convergence of all these people, groups, cultures, conjoining and competing interests on the eve of the Opium Wars. The details are too many for my powers of recollection but, nonetheless, give a rich, vivid, textural depth and complexity to the location of the opening battles in the Opium Wars. The Pearl River Delta, Canton, China. The dramatic setting is where foreign trade took over China in the mid-19th century and where China has now possibly taken over foreign trade in the 21st century, or a super big chunk of it anyway, a global convergence zone of staggering scale.
Flood of Fire (2015): The final installment in the series has all the big historical build-up events to the Opium Wars, the Qing crackdown on the opium trade, dumping tons of opium into the Pearl River, burning down the factories, and the British establishment of Hong Kong and the unequal treaties, reducing China to colonial subjects carved up by Western powers. But the battle scenes, the fires consuming the factories, are brief, if vivid and dramatic. The main action is all the multicultural interactions and conflicts in the characters of the Ibis Trilogy brought together by the opium trade, coming to head, destroying lives and birthing new more complex and multicultural ones at the same time. A Hindi woman runs away from sati sacrifice for her deceased husband, eloping with a lower-caste indentured servant, cursing her brother's life for her betrayal of the strict Indian caste order. Similarly, an Indian Parsi (Persian) woman, looking for the 'illegitimate' child of her late husband, a successful Parsi merchant in China, hooks up with an Armenian man, and emotionally wrestles with the condemnation of her orthodox Parsi community. A mixed (quadroon) American, Zachary Reid, passes as white to advance his opportunities in the factory trade system. Indian fugitives from the EIC's colonial justice live on the precarious margins of the opium trade. Hong Kong begins as a multicultural trading post committed to parasitically profiting off the poisoning of China with opium.
Overall, the Ibis Trilogy is a sympathetic and cinematic portrayal of a bunch of underdog characters in the Indian Ocean Trade Network, subalterns, lascars, fallen zamindars, and various well-intentioned scholarly adventurers (like Ghosh, undoubtably) caught up in the tumult of the opium trade and Opium Wars. Great stuff but hadn't thought too much about the series again until hearing about Ghosh's Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories (2023) from the Empire podcast. I'm not a completist with the Empire podcast by any stretch buts lots of great topics, like this one on the Opium Wars called "Victorian Narcos." Also, Empire is always good for reading references in various topics in world history. At any rate, Smoke and Ashes is Ghosh's memoir about writing the Ibis Trilogy. I actually began the book with a little trepidation, because the Ghosh book I've enjoyed least in the five books by him I've got to so far was the only other nonfiction memoir book I've read by him. Maybe I'll find his nonfiction work tedious, I feared. But not so with Smoke and Ashes.
On the surface the book is a recent review of the historical literature Ghosh researches for the Ibis Trilogy, including research that has appeared since he finished Flood of Fire in 2015. The breadth and scale of his immersion in this historical material is impressive and his translations of that research a pleasure to read, or for a retired high school teacher anyway. I often find vernacular speech in historical texts a big obstacle, laboriously stilted, but Ghosh finds ways to make pidgin sound musical and find poetic concision in bits of various foreign languages. But his review of the historical literature, including post-2015 work, grows into several polemics that I found fascinating.
1. While the West's influence in India is overt and ideological, China's influence was embedded in everyday material practices and not the dominant political discourse. For example, Tea (Chai), Porcelain (Chinemati), Sugar (Cheeni), and Peanuts (Chinebadam), common everyday features of Indian life where Ghosh grew up. But in conversation China is typically a hostile neighbor or a closed society that the world hopes to open up like any other extractive colonial resource, like India had been, frequently reducing China to a degrading caricature. You cannot read an account of the Opium Wars without recognizing the deeply humiliating historical source of the CPC's fierce insistence on national independence or why this would have so much pull with China's people. Or why China would suspect Britain's and the West's intentions regarding their right to self-determination. China resists the coercive force of private global capital today because they bitterly remember being humiliated subjects of private global capital not all that long ago. But leaning so heavily on dominating export trade, as China is today, without also cultivating domestic demand and the living standards of their own working classes is bound to cost more and more over time in police state repressive measures. Presumably at some point simply increasing police state vigilance and AI surveillance will not be enough to quell bottom-up energies wanting better living conditions, the forces of Polanyi's democratic double-movements. See Foxconn worker suicides, etc. One of the headline stories about China over the last generation has been about how China's economic miracle has so radically reduced global poverty. But people's desires won't be satisfied forever with having barely escaped desperate poverty, of course. And the CPC knows this. This is practically a foundational cliche of elite panic in world history. To Malthus, feeding the poor, subsidizing them at all, only leads to sloth and idleness. The poor quit work as soon as they can, turning to drink and making babies they cannot feed. The CPC-- and market fundamentalists in the West like Malthus-- want to keep the working classes as close to bare subsistence survival as possible. Strong enough to work but not so strong and free that they might agitate for more; better wages, or better living conditions. More luxury consumer goods, more vacation and time off work, etc. Repressing these democratic energies costs a state a lot of money. Almost an axiom of the world history I know says the poor will put up with a lot of oppression and tyranny, astonishing amounts, but in the long run internal police state crackdowns are no more stable than the colonial and imperialist great power bullying that ended in world wars in the 20th century. Neither contributes to positive and peaceful cooperation and both almost always end in violent and cataclysmic confrontations in which a lot of people get hurt or killed.
2. Opium might be the ultimate destructive sin good or natural predatory capitalist commodity? Ghosh makes the case, anyway. Tobacco, alcohol, sugar, processed foods, gambling, all tremendously popular, but are their impacts as bad as that of opium and the poppy? Maybe alcohol or gambling are rivals? Is there any other addictive drug more popular than those derived from the opiates extracted from the poppy plant? Opium, Morphine, Codeine, Heroin, Oxycodone? Ghosh claims no natural plant substance is more common in modern medicines, pharmaceuticals, than opiates. So popular that fentanyl is actually a synthetic lab creation of an opiate-like drug that promised to be less addictive than the natural plant opiate derivatives but turned out to be maybe more addictive. In mild and moderate forms opiates are a remarkably effective pain killer. To poor suffering Indian and Chinese physical laborers opium was virtually irresistible, enabling them to work longer hours despite their aggravating aches and pains. Consumed addictively its long-term effects are corrosive and withering, if not worse. Ghosh credits opium as being an "Agent of History" and attributes to it a natural power and force that humans imagine they can control but they cannot. Although, encouragingly, he points out that China was able to finally subdue the plague of opium addiction, not by penalizing addicts but by shutting down and strictly controlling its production.
3. Ghosh calls Britain's Opium Wars a "model of the colonial Narco-state" and finds striking parallels with the opioid crisis in the modern US. The EIC forced mass cultivation of the poppy in India, via the Opium Dept, and funneled the drug to vulnerable populations in China, people facing brutal labor conditions and joblessness and chronic food insecurity. Similarly, the opioid epidemic in the modern US exploded in economically vulnerable conditions, rural areas, old mining towns and de-industrialized rust-belt regions of America. The EIC used gunboat diplomacy in the Opium Wars to force China to accept the drug trade and pay reparations when China attempted to ban it. The immense profits from the opium trade built great domestic fortunes in Britain and the US (Astors, Forbes, Roosevelts), fueling industrialization, and shaping Western institutions, while government officials and merchants looked the other way. In modern America, pharmaceutical giants like Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family replicated this playbook on a corporate scale, buying off regulators at the FDA, buying off doctors to push pills, and buying off lawmakers to protect their companies from legal consequences. When the opium trade devastated Chinese families, British and Western opium traders blamed the addicts, arguing that the Chinese were inherently degenerate, corrupt, or weak-natured, and that the opium traders were just meeting demand. Again, modern drug marketers and drug policies in the 1990s recycled this exact colonial template, stigmatizing addicts as sick and depraved and pinning the blame primarily on desperate consumers rather than the drug cartels and producers (visit relevant threads on the social media site Next Door sometime if you doubt this common blaming-the-addicts take). Ghosh sees in the modern opioid crisis a kind of blowback from the Opium Wars of the colonial Narco-states. The West treating poor Chinese workers with such contempt and disdain in the 19th c. boomerangs back on their own working classes, without, again, destroying the actual sources of the problem, predatory corporate interests; Purdue Pharma or the Sacklers, etc.
Anyway, Ghosh argues the Opium Wars and the Opioid Crisis are textbook cases of predatory capitalism. I have great respect for Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence, a big history book I wrote about here. His study proved in withering detail that the West did not achieve any great divergence before 1850, and wild claims that the West was in every way ascendent and dominant by 1492 or even earlier are nonsense. In terms of actual material living conditions, living standards, lifespans, luxury consumption, the West does not achieve any great divergence with the developed parts of the East, China, India, or Japan until 1850 or thereafter. But Pomeranz's failure to recognize the Opium Wars as pivotal and emblematic of this humiliating transition was I think a copout; like his snarky dismissal of historian Walter Rodney's evidence suggesting the slave trade and plantation economy subsidized the industrial revolution in Europe. Of course it fucking did. This is part of common trend in US historiography to gloss over the industrial revolution, to omit the humanitarian crimes of predatory capitalism and imperialism in the 19th century, or sweep them under the rug as the necessary social costs of free market and capitalist progress. Ghosh's postcolonial historical fiction wants to pull back the rug and expose the grinding poverty and destruction of the colonial and imperialist enterprises, the bitter counterpoint to its centrifugal, multicultural, and modernizing effects.
Footnotes:
1. Game of Thrones (2011-2019) and House of the Dragon (2022-2026). Let me state from the outset that this taste I have developed for historical fiction does have its downsides. I have a weakness for historical costume dramas, as mentioned. If a movie or TV series presents any reasonably believable vision of whatever historical period, has that gritty, convincing, realism I want, crave, I'm game. So I watched Game of Thrones. And now the House of the Dragon. I like their look and feel; some have called it "medieval realism." If nothing else, the series vividly realizes the extreme conditions of pre-modern social inequality (see my second note). The little people, they are repeatedly called, live in rags and squalor and hand to mouth. And the relentlessly plotting and scheming of the royal courts, dynastic families and their hired Hands, the center of nearly all the action, is a deadly game of thrones, of incest and fratricide, to secure succession and power. This is a near universal feature of ancient kingdoms and monarchies, as far as I know the history. And I like the way they compress the wider world around Westeros (the British Isles) with touches of fantasy. Martin's Wall holding back the northern menace. Dragons that operate like WMD's, devastating populations with something like Byzantine "Greek Fire." But I have my limits with the fantasy stuff as well. I found the Ice Zombies in the original series tedious real fast. And by the end of this series the political dynamics were so reductively predictable. A royal female heir wants to bring peace and spread prosperity to the kingdom, realizing the dreams of a benevolent dead king ancestor, but the always nearly psychotic ambitions of other possible heirs, mostly men, of course, drive the queen in the end to firebomb the people with dragons. Subduing the kingdom by destroying its people. Again. This was the brutal turn of the last season of the original series. And now the House of the Dragon, a prequel, repeats the formula, as if to say this is how it always goes: Monarchal rule for peace and prosperity is always undermined by the cutthroat and brutal game of thrones over royal succession, by patriarchal gender norms and psychotic power mad men. Probably not all that far from the truth but drearily predictable and all the contenders to the throne in House of the Dragon are grotesque caricatures. I was hardly paying attention by the end. The prequel was mercifully only three seasons, compared to the original's eight seasons, but I still think a bit of a let down.
2. This reminds me of French world historian Fernand Braudel's book, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century. Again, in withering detail, Braudel makes the case that the everyday life of 93-95% of people in the early modern period (1450-1750) living within reach of a city or town, urban agricultural civilization (he piles on the evidence from Europe but adds case examples from places like China and India and Japan as well), are laboring peasants living off gruel and what hardscrabble social life they can hang onto in grindingly impoverished conditions. No wonder then the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, American and French, are such a radical break in world history. Not so much in generating any immediate change to those miserable material conditions-- Piketty laments in one of his books that 100 years after the French Revolution much of the wealth in France was still concentrated in the top 5-7% of the population-- but because the liberal promises of the progressive era go back to the democratic revolutions. One of Piketty's big points is progressive policy change in governments take off in the late 19th century (social insurance, income taxes, antitrust, etc) long before the cataclysm of the world wars in the 20th c, as some historians argue was necessary prelude to significant progressive change, and a long time before the New Deal 1930s. Anyway, the rhetoric that fuels those progressive policy claims, the liberal promises to the 93-95% that began to gain traction in the late 19th century were rooted in the democratic revolutions of the 18th century. Or you could argue they go back to the Enlightenment writers in the 17th century but the democratic revolutions turned their words and academic claptrap into a political cause and movements for liberal democratic individual rights and equal legal protections, self-determination, national sovereignty, and a system of laws protecting human rights and freedoms, that have inspired liberal political movements ever since. And, unfortunately, also inspired a conservative reaction as well, blood and soil, racist bigot reaction opposed to extending liberal rights protections to poor immigrants, minorities, women, or even workers. Anybody they don't like, basically.
Musical Coda: Up there with Ravi Shankar as my favorite Indian or South Asian music artist. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pakistani, musician, singer, composer, most associated with a style of Sufi Islamic devotional music but was also master of Hindustani classical music. Kinetic beats, cycling mantric chanting vocal intensity, harmoniums, long build ups and ecstatic drum circle like peaks. Huge influence on South Asian popular music. He got big in global world music circles when he recorded some albums for Peter Gabriel's Real World Records beginning in 1989. He was a resident scholar in the musicology department at the University of Washington in 1993 and 1994. He makes global dance music with an unparalleled spiritual intensity, and the kind of cultural mixing energies always a part of the South Asian experience and evoked by the Ibis Trilogy.
