Smoke and Ashes

Ghosh returns to the opium trade that shadowed his Ibis trilogy, this time as nonfiction, tracing how Bengal-grown opium funded the British Empire's finances and seeded fortunes behind some of America's most prestigious institutions and families. Critics singled out the book's double register: it's a rigorously archival history and, in its closing sections, a personal reckoning with Ghosh's own family's entanglement with the trade. Reviewers were struck less by any single revelation than by the scale of the argument, that a drug economy, not just trade in tea or textiles, was load-bearing infrastructure for empire.