In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton? And what fate befell those aboard the Redruth, a sturdy two-masted brig heading East out of Cornwall? Was it the storm that altered their course or were the destinies of these passengers at the mercy of even more powerful forces? On the grand scale of an historical epic, River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China.…
"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."
