Amitav Ghosh

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Asian men on their way to England end up conversing with Napoleon during his final exile on St. Helena. But most of the history that shapes Ghosh's fiction is the history of Asia--India, Burma, China--and of British colonialism in that half of the planet.

The Ibis Trilogy explores the people and the moment that led up to the Opium War, that mid-nineteenth century conflict between the British and the Chinese empires that was a cynical, and successful, effort to protect the British opium trade in China.

It's a history seldom discussed in the United States, but much of the rest of the world understands Western colonialism in this context. For more than a century the British forced Indian farmers on the Gangetic Plain, perhaps the most fertile region of the subcontinent, to cultivate only opium poppies. The British East India Company processed this opium, then smuggled it more or less openly into China, where they encouraged what became an epidemic of addiction. When the Chinese emperor tried to outlaw this incredibly lucrative and destructive trade, the British went to war. They succeeded in continuing their addictive business for another half century and, incidentally, getting a century-long lease on the island of Hong Kong.