River of Smoke

"‬I love this book.‭ ‬It was a book that,‭ ‬as I was getting towards the end,‭ ‬I wanted to read slower and slower and slower so I wouldn’t finish it.‭ ‬The weekly clothes market on the Singapore River,‭ ‬which is a scene fairly early in the novel,‭ ‬is a brilliant illustration of the kinds of exchanges within Asia that are so interesting to historians.‭ ‬He calls it the‭ ‘‬Wordy-Market,‭’ ‬which is a wonderful phrase.‭ ‬The novel is about friendship,‭ ‬commerce and empire as well as being about the tragic story of opium.‭ ‬It’s a great illustration of one of those novels which are themselves marvellous histories of economic life.‭ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Tobacco is not steering the world economy in the way that opium did,‭ ‬but there have been many comparisons made between opium and tobacco and I think they are very compelling indeed.‭ ‬The expansion of cigarette use across large parts of Southeast Asia is really terrifying.‭ Energy commodities are obviously going to be central to the‭ ‬21st-century world economy,‭ ‬and everything that has to do with processing fossil fuels.‭ ‬The largest issue for the world economy is global climate change and recent studies of permafrost in the Arctic are extraordinarily perturbing.‭ ‬I think that the conflict over energy,‭ ‬which is a conflict with many different dimensions,‭ ‬is bound to be central."