Science & Society, Vol. 86, No.

3, July 2022, 370–388

Opium and the Family

in the Writings of Karl Marx

MAYA SINGHAL
ABSTRACT: Marx’s assertion that religion “is the opium of the
people” is his most famous invocation of opium, but references to
the drug appear throughout his work, providing a window into his
theories of gender, the family, and the state. Responding to moral
panics around a spike in rates of infanticide by opium among the
working class in 19th-century England, Marx suggests that the spike
was caused by women’s increasing workforce participation. Marx
uses trades of opium and cotton between England and China to
exemplify problems with prevailing economic theories of money
and exchange, but he also explains why opium and cotton were not
comparable trades: the illicit opium trade in China undermined
the Chinese government by promoting corruption. While many
accounts of commodity trades in the 19th century treat opium as
either a normal commodity or a moral disaster, Marx’s invocations
of opium and infanticide encompass a debate about working-class
subsistence, changing bourgeois norms, and state power.

KEYWORDS: Marx, opium, infanticide, women, China, England,

19th century

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of
real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the
sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
— Marx, 1843, emphasis in original

O
NLY THE INTRODUCTION to A Contribution to the Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was published during Marx’s life-
time; yet this passage remains his most famous invocation of
opium. Marx compares religion to opium as a soporific that obscures
370
 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 371

the inhumanity of the capitalist system. Like opium, religion provides

a release for the suffering caused by this system. Although this passage
is the most frequently cited, references to opium appear throughout
Marx’s work. In fact, opium provides a window into Marx’s theories
of gender, the family, and the state — it is a crucial feature of Marx’s
ethnographic analysis of England’s relationship with China in the 19th
century. Many feminist scholars argue over the place of women and
children in Marx’s theories of capital. Meanwhile, scholars of China
often debate whether Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production” adequately
describes China before the Opium Wars. This article argues that a
focus on Marx’s invocations of opium helps to illuminate his stance
on both of these issues: for Marx, opium highlights the fissures in
family structures, whether it was the nuclear family in England or
what he understood as the hereditary state structure in China. Marx
writes about opium in three different ways, which I will discuss in the
first three sections of this article. In Capital, Volume I (1990 [1867]),
Marx is largely concerned with the effects of opium in Europe, where
opium and its derivatives morphine and laudanum were legal phar-
maceuticals. Responding to moral panics around a disturbing spike in
rates of infanticide by opium among the working class in 19th-century
England, Marx suggests that this spike should actually be attributed to
the increasing participation in factory and gang labor by working-class
women (1990, 521). In Capital, Volume III (1991 [1894], 686; 713),
Marx uses trades of opium and cotton between England and China to
exemplify problems with prevailing economic theories of money and
exchange. However, in his journalism, Marx explains why opium and
cotton were not comparable trades: the illicit opium trade in China
undermined the “paternal” Chinese government by promoting bribery
and corruption (2007a [1853], 4). While many historical accounts of
commodity trades in the 19th century simply treat opium as a nor-
mal commodity and other accounts by politicians and journalists at
the time fretted over the relationship between opium addiction and
infanticide in both Europe and Asia, Marx’s invocations of opium and
infanticide1 highlight the major contradictions he identified in the

1 I use the word “infanticide” here to refer to both accidental and intentional deaths of
children at the hands of their parents or guardians. While forensic inquiry often seeks to
distinguish different crimes based on intent, I suggest Marx’s approach takes both accidental
and intentional deaths of children as indicators of the same range of problems with the
conditions of the laboring class.
372 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

conditions of the working class in England and in the relationship

between the Chinese government and the population it governed.

1. Opium Infanticide in England

In October 1862, a 16-month-old baby died from an opium over-

dose in East London. The baby had had a cough and his mother had
gotten a series of medicines from a local chemist, whom she mistak-
enly believed to be a doctor, and his wife. On the final treatment, the
chemist had written the wrong instructions on the bottle, accidentally
prescribing twice the intended amount. The baby had had a “fit,”
and the mother had sent for a doctor, but nothing could be done.
The doctor concluded that the baby died from narcotic poisoning
and moreover, that opium should never have been prescribed for
the baby’s particular ailment. At the inquest on the baby’s death, the
coroner ordered a fuller investigation of the chemist because of “the
number of such cases” (“Inquests,” 1862).
Similar stories of opium-induced deaths of children, both acci-
dental and intentional, circulated frequently in 19th-century English
newspapers. An 1853 case in Cambridgeshire blamed a death on a
mother giving her child “a piece of crude opium to suck” (“English
Opium Eaters,” 1855). The mother, the New York Daily Times reported,
was from a family of opium eaters, and despite being poor (“labor-
ing people”), “spent four shillings a week on the drug” (ibid.). While
acknowledging the deaths of children from opium prescriptions, many
people instead focused on low-class, provincial opium eaters, who had
“local knowledge of opium” that made them comfortable giving their
children liberal doses to quiet them while they worked (British Medical
Journal, 1865). The medical officer of the Privy Council remarked:
“The mothers — namely, the agricultural gang women — appear often
to be very reckless whether children live or die. The children are an
encumbrance to them” (ibid.).
Marx mentions these opium infanticides at various points in Capi-
tal, Volume I. But unlike many of the people quoted in the newspapers,
Marx is not concerned with whether or not opium eating violates bour-
geois social mores or health codes, so he does not discuss addiction or
the moral failings of addicts. Instead, Marx is interested in the societal
causes and consequences of infanticide in England. In this sense, one
might read Marx’s approach to opium infanticide as in keeping with
 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 373

later works, such as Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1979 [1897]) and Ida
B. Wells’ The Red Record (1895).2 Suicide, for Durkheim, is more than
suicide; it reveals the impact of larger social imbalances, disjunctures,
and other crises on people within a society. Wells, similarly, argues that
lynching was actually a broader response to Black economic progress.
Marx’s approach to infanticide also treats this phenomenon as indica-
tive of larger social problems. Infanticide highlights debates about
working conditions and subsistence for the working-class family in
the face of changing bourgeois norms.
To understand how Marx discusses opium and infanticide, it
is useful to first recapitulate his arguments about the changing
status of women, children, and families in industrialized places.3 In
Chapter 15 of Capital I, Marx describes the effects of machines on
the worker. Machines enable the employment of “workers of slight
muscular strength, or whose bodily development is incomplete, but
whose limbs are all the more supple” (1990, 517). These machines
force women and children into the workforce, reducing the value
of men’s labor-power. Women and children were also more likely to
accept lower wages than men. Marx quotes Thomas de Quincey, writ-
ing: “The numerical increase of laborers has been great, through the
growing substitution of female for male, and above all, of childish for
adult labor. Three girls of 13, at wages from 6 shillings to 8 shillings
a week, have replaced the one man of mature age, at wages varying
from 18 shillings to 45 shillings” (1990, 518 n39). Where, at one time,
the value of a man’s labor-power could support an entire family, that
value is now spread over each member of the family. Although it might
be slightly more expensive to purchase the labor of four members
of a family, they produce four times as much surplus value for the
capitalist. In this calculus, machines actually increase the exploitation
of the worker (Marx, 1990, 518).
As a result of these conditions, Marx writes: “Compulsory work for
the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children’s play, but
also of independent labor at home, within customary limits, for the
family itself” (1990, 517). In a footnote, Marx elaborates this relation-
ship between domestic labor and capitalist labor:

2 The relationship between these texts is highlighted by Ralph, 2020.

3 Seccombe (1992; 1993) also discusses the changes in the nuclear family and gender roles
from feudalism to capitalism, going into much more detail about how the changing status
of labor and property impacted the form of the family during this transition.
374 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

Since certain family functions, such as nursing and suckling children, cannot
be entirely suppressed, the mothers who have been confiscated by capital
must try substitutes of some sort. Domestic work, such as sewing or mending,
must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles. Hence the dimin-
ished expenditure of labour in the house is accompanied by an increased
expenditure of money outside. The cost of production of the working-class
family therefore increases, and balances its greater income. (Marx, 1990,
518, n39.)

Women’s increased participation in the workforce proves that domes-

tic labor had value because there is a monetary cost that comes with the
loss of this labor. While scholars like Cedric Robinson have criticized
Marx for treating the labor of women and children as “unimportant”
and “noncapitalist” (Robinson, 2000, xxix), Marx provides a more
specific critique of the difference between domestic labor and pro-
ductive labor. The loss of domestic labor necessitates the purchase of
supplementary goods and services, which are both more expensive
than domestic labor and are often inadequate to care for the family.
In a 1912 speech about women’s suffrage and class struggle, Rosa
Luxemburg builds on Marx’s distinction between domestic and pro-
ductive labor to explain the distinctions between bourgeois and pro-
letarian women:

Economically and socially, the women of the exploiting classes are not an
independent segment of the population. Their only social function is to be
tools of the natural propagation of the ruling classes. By contrast, the women
of the proletariat are economically independent. They are productive for so-
ciety like the men. By this I do not mean their bringing up children or their
housework which helps men support their families on scanty wages. This kind
of work is not productive in the senses of the present capitalist economy no
matter how enormous an achievement the sacrifices and energy spent, the
thousand little efforts add up to. This is but the private affair of the worker,
his happiness and blessing, and for this reason nonexistent for our present
society. As long as capitalism and the wage system rule, only that kind of work
is considered productive which produces surplus value, which creates capitalist
profit. From this point of view, the music-hall dancer whose legs sweep profit
into her employer’s pocket is a productive worker, whereas all the toil of the
proletarian women and mothers in the four walls of their homes is considered
unproductive. This sounds brutal and insane, but corresponds exactly to the
brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy. (Luxemburg, 1912.)
 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 375

For Luxemburg and Marx, bourgeois women are exploited by their

husbands, while proletarian women are exploited by capitalists. How-
ever, while women’s economic freedom could help abolish the bour-
geois family, the capitalist system still privileges those classes that can
rely on women’s domestic labor because, under this system, parents
are solely responsible for the child. Therefore, as Marx described in
the above quote, the working-class family has to struggle to afford
adequate childcare in the place of domestic labor.
For Marx and Engels, the bourgeois family is merely established
for capital and private gain (1978 [1848], 487). As Heather Brown
writes: “Members of the bourgeoisie have relinquished much of their
subjectivity to market-forces, and in its place have substituted paren-
tal authority over their children. While it is not necessarily the case
that this authority is detrimental to the child, the economic relations
outside the family tend to imprint themselves on social relations”
(2012, 47). In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels assert that
a communist revolution would remove children from the exclusive
authority of their parents such that they would not be exploited by
them. They argue: “The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and edu-
cation, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes
all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry,
all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder and their chil-
dren transferred into simple articles of commerce and instruments of
labor” (Marx and Engels, 1978, 487–8). In Capital I, Marx’s invocations
of opium highlight the failures of working-class strategies to care for
their children under a bourgeois system.
Citing the high death rates of children in factory areas, Marx argues
that the “substitutes” for domestic labor are insufficient and even fatal:

The high death-rates [of children] are, apart from local causes, principally
due to the employment of the mothers away from their homes, and to the
neglect and maltreatment arising from their absence, which consists of things
such as insufficient nourishment, unsuitable food and dosing with opiates;
besides this, there arises an unnatural estrangement between mother and
child, and as a consequence intentional starving and poisoning of the chil-
dren. (Marx, 1990, 521.)

Rather than blaming mothers for feeding their children opium like
many of his contemporaries, Marx shows how working conditions
376 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

necessitated extreme measures to balance working in factories and in

the home.4 Feminist scholars like Claudia Leeb have criticized Marx’s
implication that women should be “naturally” connected to their
children, while men need not be. Comparing these opium-induced
infanticides to Marx’s metaphor of religion as opium, Leeb writes:

He explains here that subjects invent God as a solace, a painkiller, to which

the notion of opium alludes in 19th century Germany, to deal with their
misery produced by capitalism. However, Marx does not consider that the
working-class woman’s supposed alienation from her children might express a
“heartless world” under both patriarchy and capitalism, where she is exploited
not only by the capitalist entrepreneur but also by men, who consider her to
be “naturally” responsible for children. (Leeb, 2007, 851.)

Actually, Marx seems to be arguing precisely this: that it is the conflict

between bourgeois expectations for women’s roles in the family and
the necessity that working-class women labor outside the home that
leaves children vulnerable to death.
Furthermore, if Marx was particularly concerned with the relation-
ships between mothers and children, it is likely because, by the middle
of the 19th century, there was an unprecedented number of single
mothers in England. According to Annie Cossins, “by 1861, recorded
illegitimate births amounted to an annual figure of 44,157 compared
with 20,039 in 1830. Yet the population of England and Wales had
only increased by less than a third in that period, while illegitimate
births had doubled” (2015, 70). Little help could be expected from
the fathers because “the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 had made
bastardy orders hard both to obtain and enforce” (Bentley, 2005, 199).
Single mothers were generally dismissed from their jobs, so women
tended to hide their pregnancies as long as they could and then either
killed the children themselves or turned them over to baby-farmers
(Bentley, 2005, 199).
As Judith Knelman writes: “Baby-farmers took care of children
whose mothers did not want them or could not have them. Their

4 Disciplining the body into factory labor and adjusting to the working day generally were
processes that required a copious amount of new chemical products, from coffee and cocaine
to wake up in the morning to alcohol and opiates to help calm workers’ addled nerves at
night. The bourgeoisie, too, had their own range of pharmaceutical supplements and cures
for the ailments and deficiencies of adult and child bodies in capitalist society; see Mintz,
1985; Courtwright, 2001; McCoy, 2003.
 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 377

clientele comprised, among others, prostitutes, servants, factory hands,

and unfaithful wives of absent husbands” (1998, 159). Mothers would
either pay a fee upfront to have the baby-farmers adopt their child “for
life,” or they would pay weekly or monthly fees for the baby-farmers to
feed the child “at a bare subsistence level that allowed them a profit”
(Knelman, 1998, 159). Generally, if mothers paid up front, the child
would be killed or neglected until they died to maximize profit for the
baby-farmer. In these cases, opium was used to quiet the often large
numbers of children in a baby-farmer’s care. As Cossins notes, baby-
farming provoked the first moral panic around “infant deaths in out-of-
home care” (2015, 2), highlighting widespread suspicion of the “witchy”
working-class woman, who lacked the bourgeois instinct for childcare.
Baby-farming, thus, was one such inadequate “substitute” for “mothers
who [had] been confiscated by capital” (Marx, 1990, 518, n39).
Opium was also used as a substitute for breastfeeding. As cited
earlier, the “family functions” that, Marx notes, “cannot be entirely
suppressed” are “nursing and suckling children” (ibid.). He expands
on the suggestion that opiates are used in place of nursing, citing a
report on women who were laid off from factory work because of the
cotton crisis after the U. S. Civil War: “The women now had sufficient
leisure to give their infants the breast, instead of poisoning them
with ‘Godfrey’s Cordial’ (an opiate)” (Marx, 1990, 518, n38). Opium,
here, highlights the impediments factory work posed to the “natural”
necessity of breastfeeding. Other Victorian-era writers also note the
use of opium as a hunger suppressant. In Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’s
1848 novel about working-class Manchester, Mary Barton, she writes:
“Many a penny that would have gone little way enough in oatmeal
or potatoes, bought opium to still the hungry little ones, and make
them forget their uneasiness in heavy troubled sleep. It was mother’s
mercy” (Gaskell, 1848). Gaskell does not expand on the longer-term
effects of opium on children, but these doses were frequently fatal.
However, women’s increased participation in the workforce was
not the only reason children accidentally overdosed on opiates. A 19th-
century (ca. 1830–1850) advertisement for “Dr. Benjamin Godfrey’s
Cordial, prepared by Benjamin Godfrey Windus (the sole proprietor),
at the Original Warehouse, No. 61, Bishopsgate Street Without, Lon-
don” claims: “Godfrey’s Cordial is a medicine which has a general
tendency to the curing of many diseases, particularly the cholic, grip-
ing or pain in the bowels, and [diarrhea]: it also corrects and stops
378 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

the violent working of any vomit or purge whatsoever; and it yields to

no medicine in easing the hooping cough, colds, rheumatism, and
all kinds of dry and tickling coughs.” The advertisement goes on to
list the host of other ailments in women and children the medicine
addresses, but warns: “The high and just esteem in which the ‘Genu-
ine Godfrey’s Cordial’ is held renders it not surprising, though much
to be regretted, that numerous counterfeits are shamefully imposed
upon the public.” Ensuring the purchase of the genuine medicine,
then, ensures that “this cordial may be taken with perfect safety and
success, by children from the birth to the latest period of life” (Windus,
1830–1850). The advertisement does not describe the ingredients of
the cordial, but even the concern over the counterfeits and the insis-
tence upon the safety of the genuine recipe suggests the widespread
problem of acquiring safe pharmaceuticals for children.
In 1881, J. B. Moore, a New York druggist, similarly wrote of the
medical necessity of Godfrey’s Cordial but lamented the wide variety
of recipes in use by different chemists. In order to minimize the dan-
ger of opium and maximize the anti-acid properties, as needed by
children, he recommended this recipe to standardize the medicine:

Deodorized tincture of opium… 1 ½ fluid ounces.

Molasses (New Orleans)5……… 1 pint.
Brandy………………………….... 6 fluid ounces.
Boiling water…………………..... 22 “ ”
Bicarbonate of sodium………… 1 troy ounce.
Oil of sassafras,
Oil of peppermint…………….... of each ½ drachms.
Carbonate of magnesium……… 3 drachms.
Mix the brandy with the boiling water in a half gallon bottle.
Rub the oils with the carbonate of magnesium in a mortar for
about ten minutes.
Titrate the mixture thoroughly with eight fluid ounces of the hot
menstruum gradually added; then transfer the mixture to the bottle

5 In England, molasses, or treacle, was “at least as important as any crystalline form of sugar”
for more than a century. At first, “Mellasses” was only sold in apothecary shops, but as early
as the 17th century, it was distilled to make rum and used in a variety of sweet treats. Sidney
Mintz describes “two so-called triangles of trade, both of which arose in the 17th century
and matured in the 18th.” In the first, British goods were sold in Africa, enslaved Africans
brought to the Americas, and commodities from the Americas sold back to Britain. In the
second, “from New England went rum to Africa, whence slaves to the West Indies, whence
molasses back to New England (with which to make rum)” (Mintz, 1985, 22, 41–3).
 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 379

containing the remainder of the menstruum, and shake the whole

vigorously. Then set it aside, shaking occasionally, and when cool
filter through paper, and add through the filter sufficient water to
make the filtrate measure twenty-eight fluid ounces. In this dissolve
the carbonate of sodium, and add to the solution, first the molas-
ses, and then the tincture of deodorized opium; mix well, and, if
necessary, strain through muslin. (Moore, 1881.)

In his article, Moore explains how he adjusted the original Godfrey’s

Cordial recipe for better efficacy, and he describes how chemists might
make all of the ingredients such that this recipe could be standardized.
However, he also adds notes like: “Gin or whiskey, however, might be
employed instead of brandy, if desired” (ibid.), which suggests the
somewhat wide variation even among what he might have considered
to be a “standard officinal remedy” (ibid.).
Beyond pharmacists simply using different recipes, Marx also
explains that, frequently, food and medicine were “adulterated” to
try to make rations cheaper and keep workers’ wages down:

From the reports of the most recent Parliamentary Commission on adultera-

tion of the means of subsistence, it will be seen that the adulteration even
of medicines is the rule, not the exception, in England. For example, the
examination of 34 specimens of opium, bought from the same number of
different chemists in London, showed that 31 were adulterated with poppy
heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, etc. Several specimens did not contain
an atom of morphine. (Marx, 1990, 750, n43.)

As the case of the 16-month-old baby described earlier illustrates,

chemists also pretended to be doctors for profit and sometimes, simply
made fatal mistakes. The motive of profit created a perilous pharma-
ceutical industry that made it easy for mothers to give their children
incorrect doses of drugs with unintentionally lethal effects.
However, while the unreliability of chemists is partly at fault for
increased rates of infanticide, Marx further makes the case that infan-
ticide was caused by women’s participation in the workforce by citing
a public health report stating that in agricultural areas, where women
worked less, infanticide rates were much lower. When there were com-
parable rates to factory districts, reports found that causes were similar:
women were being employed in labor gangs. Marx cites a report by
a doctor, who wrote that the women in these work gangs “are to be
380 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

met morning and evening on the roads, dressed in short petticoats,

with suitable coats and boots, and sometimes trousers, looking won-
derfully strong and healthy, but tainted with a customary immorality
and heedless of the fatal results which their love of this busy and
independent life is bringing on their unfortunate offspring who are
pining at home” (1990, 522). Marx adds: “All the phenomena of the
factory districts are reproduced here, including a yet higher degree
of disguised infanticide and stupefaction of children with opiates”
(ibid.). Later, Marx describes these gangs as bastions of immorality,
with many young girls getting pregnant by boys of similar age. He
adds: “Their children, when opium does not finish them off entirely,
are born recruits for the gang” (1990, 852). Again, rather than ascribe
infanticide to mothers’ addictions, as did many of his contemporaries,
Marx suggests that the conditions of labor make it difficult for mothers
to care for their children. Furthermore, because labor like gang work
is considered unskilled, while labor is valuable, individual workers
are imagined to be numerous and interchangeable, so the deaths of
children as future unskilled laborers are not major concerns.6
Both Leeb and Brown critique Marx’s moralizing about the women
in these gangs. For Leeb, Marx is both disgusted and desirous (Leeb,
2007, 850) of the working women, nearly masculine in appearance and
action. However, she takes the doctor’s report cited above as Marx’s
own description of working women, so it is difficult to read this criti-
cism seriously. Brown suggests: “There may be some criticism of the
potential for sexual exploitation in this system, although Marx is far
from clear on this point” (2012, 87). Part of the problem here is that,
as described above by Bentley, legally, women alone were responsible
for illegitimate children, so, while there was a “demoralization” of the
whole gang (Marx, 1990, 851), the “moral character” (Marx, 1990,
852) of the girls was the only one for which there were any visible or
legal consequences.

6 Ralph (2018) discusses how enslaved people in the United States were valued differently
and insured based on the kinds of expertise they cultivated. Where plantation slaves’ labor
was valuable, the enslaved people themselves were considered unskilled and were often
worked to death. Meanwhile, enslaved people who cultivated expertise in mining, carpentry,
blacksmithing, and other industries were considered more valuable investments and were
frequently insured against accidental death or injury (Ralph, n.d.). Wright (2006) similarly
argues that women working in factories in the Global South are often considered inter-
changeable and disposable: As the value of the products they create increases, the workers
themselves are imagined to be constantly devaluing, being run down and turning to waste.
 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 381

In a footnote after his first description of “disguised infanticide

and stupefaction of children with opiates” (Marx, 1990, 522) in agri-
cultural districts, Marx writes:

In the agricultural as well as the factory districts of England the consumption

of opium among adult workers, both male and female is extending daily. “To
push the sale of opiate . . . is the great aim of some enterprising wholesale
merchants. By druggists it is considered the leading article” ([Public Health,
Sixth Report, London, 1864], 459). Infants that received opiates “shrank up
into little old men,” or “wizened like little monkeys” (ibid., 460). We see here
how India and China have taken their revenge on England. (Marx, 1990,
522, n51.)

It is a curious footnote, especially the final sentence. Can vengeful

intention really be ascribed to trades between de facto and de jure colo-
nies and a metropole? Marx’s suggestion that infanticide in England
is China and India’s revenge seems to highlight the parallels he draws
between the destruction of the English nuclear family and the desta-
bilization of what he sees as the hereditary Chinese state, both due
to related expansions of colonialism and trade.

2. The Opium Trade

In the mid-19th century, newspapers everywhere from India to

the United States carried reports about infanticide in India and China
(Adams, 1842; “Humanity,” 1845; “Official Correspondence,” 1854;
“Use of Opium in India,” 1894). Reports from India argued that peo-
ple were killing their female babies, frequently with opium, to avoid
having to marry them off. Reports from China blamed infanticide and
polygamy on the “paternalistic” structure of the Chinese government.
These cases were cited to legitimate ongoing colonial exploitation in
India and to argue for the morality of England’s intervention during
the Opium Wars. In an 1841 speech, which concluded that Britain
was right in its “War with China,” John Quincy Adams argued that:

The principle of the Chinese government is, that the whole nation is one
great family, of which the emperor is the father. His authority is unlimited,
and he can, not only appoint such of his sons as he pleases to succeed him,
but may even transfer the succession to another family. Idol worship, po-
lygamy, infanticide, are the natural consequences of such a system within
382 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

the realm, and the assumption of a pretension to superiority over all other
nations regulates their intercourse with foreigners. (Adams, 1842.)

Adams clearly does not account for infanticide in England at the time,
instead highlighting what he sees as indicators of Chinese immorality.
However, the use of infanticide to legitimate colonialism clearly recalls
Marx’s statement that the deleterious effects of opium on children in
England indicate “how India and China have taken their revenge on
England” (1990, 522, n51). Opium, like cotton (Beckert, 2016) and
sugar (Mintz, 1985), is a sort of quintessential colonial commodity
(Lowe, 2015), the trade of which, many scholars argue, spurred on the
development of capitalism in China and certainly played a major role
in colonialism in China and India.7 If infanticide was an important
indicator of larger social problems, infanticide by opium highlights
the unique set of issues created by colonialism and the expansion of
the capitalist system.
When discussing opium as a commodity, Marx begins to explain
the more global implications of these trades. In Capital III, Marx
uses opium trades as examples of how credit, money, and commodity
prices work in tandem: England buys silver from France with gold, the
silver is sent to India to buy opium, and the opium goes to China in
exchange for silk. For Marx, this trade presents useful examples about
the relationship between the value of metal money and commodity
prices and about exchange rates between countries (1991, 686; 713).
But Marx also regularly uses examples from other commodity trades,
notably cotton.
In his journalism, Marx makes more explicit his concern about the
impact of the opium trade on other recognized forms of “legitimate”
commerce between Europe and China: “The Chinese cannot take
both goods and drug; under actual circumstances, extension of the
Chinese trades resolves into extension of the opium trade; the growth
of the latter is incompatible with the development of legitimate com-
merce” (2007b [1858], 25). In Capital III, Marx also comments on the
assumption of China’s demand for English goods: “The new market
offered a new pretext for an expansion that was already in full swing,
particularly in the cotton industry. ‘How can we ever produce too
much? We have 300 million people to clothe,’ I was told at the time

7 Macauley (2021) calls this “narco-capitalism.”

 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 383

by a Manchester manufacturer” (1991, 534). Manufacturers tried to

make a “double profit” by selling cloth in China and then “selling the
return cargo in England” (ibid.). Criticizing this system of credit, Marx
writes: “This was the origin of the system of mass consignments to India
and China against advances, which developed very soon into a sys-
tem of consignments simply for the sake of advances . . . which could
lead only to a massive flooding of the markets and a crash” (ibid.). In
these examples, Marx considers the fallacies of the opium trade and
the problems it created in reality in England. However, beyond the
dichotomy between the opium trade and “legitimate commerce,” most
narratives about the 19th century (see also Frank, 1998) discuss how
opium changed the balance of trade between England and China but
do not do enough to clarify what made opium unlike any other com-
modity. Opium use had devastating effects on the health and social
lives of people in China in ways that the consumption of commodities
like cotton did not. But the importation of opium also contributed to
the destabilization of the Chinese government in distinct ways.

3. Opium and the Chinese State

The sale of opium for smoking was banned in China in 1729.

However, this had little effect on the number of opium users in the
country. In 1773, the East India Company was granted a monopoly on
opium in Bengal, which they began trading more heavily in Canton.
Opium imports into China were banned in 1799, and stricter laws
against the sale of opium were passed in 1814 and 1831. By that time,
the East India Company had established a system of smuggling such
that, legally, they were not associated with the trade (Feige and Miron,
2008). According to Marx, the explicit flouting of Chinese law by
opium traders helped to undermine and destabilize the Chinese state.
Describing the impacts of opium in China, Marx writes:
Up to 1830, the balance of trade being continually in favor of the Chinese,
there existed an uninterrupted importation of silver from India, Britain
and the United States into China. Since 1833, and especially since 1840,
the export of silver from China to India has become almost exhausting for
the Celestial Empire. Hence the strong decrees of the Emperor against the
opium trade, responded to by still stronger resistance to his measures. Be-
sides this immediate economical consequence, the bribery connected with
opium smuggling has entirely demoralized the Chinese State officers in the
384 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

Southern provinces. Just as the Emperor was wont to be considered the fa-
ther of all China, so his officers were looked upon as sustaining the paternal
relation to their respective districts. But this patriarchal authority, the only
moral link embracing the vast machinery of the State, has gradually been
corroded by the corruption of those officers, who have made great gains by
conniving at opium smuggling. (Marx, 2007a, 4.)

Again, Marx is not concerned with the demoralizing effects of addiction

in China. Instead, it is the bribery and corruption inherent to illicit
trade that destroys the “hereditary” structure of the state.
Many scholars have taken up Marx’s limited writings (1965
[1857–8]) on economic systems in China before the Opium Wars to
describe a whole theory of the “Asiatic mode of production,” which has
been critiqued by many others because it is based on limited evidence
and ignores historical change (Chang, 1983). Donald Lowe has argued
that Marx’s understanding of China builds from Hegel’s. For Hegel,
“China was at the initial stage in the realization of freedom; she had
never advanced beyond the stage of freedom for the emperor alone;
therefore in China the emperor commanded and the people complied
without reflection or will” (Lowe, 1966, 2). Like the bourgeois family
in which the father “owns” his family members, Marx imagined the
paternal Chinese state was ordered such that there was one governmen-
tal “father” controlling citizens in the country. As in England, opium
highlighted how changing economic conditions and regimes of state
power can destroy the bonds of this “family” structure. If the opium
infanticide of English children is not actually the “vengeance” of India
and China, then it is certainly a satisfying reversal that the substance
that undermined the “paternal relation” of the Chinese government
also plays a central role in the devastation of the English family.
However, Marx does not mean that the destruction of the paternal
Chinese state was detrimental. Marx saw the Opium Wars as dramati-
cally forcing China to develop. Reflecting on the impacts of the 1850
Taiping rebellion, which he reads as a response to the condition of
China after the Opium Wars, Marx goes on to say:

It is almost needless to observe that, in the same measure in which opium

has obtained the sovereignty over the Chinese, the Emperor and his staff
of pedantic mandarins have become dispossessed of their own sovereignty.
It would seem as though history had first to make this whole people drunk
before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity. (2007a, 4.)
 OPIUM AND THE FAMILY 385

According to Marx, the destruction of the paternal state in China

because of the opium trade might have actually helped China towards
revolution and social change. As Lowe writes, Marx and Engels saw
“a changing China because they could finally detect familiar Europe-
oriented changes” (1966, 28). Of course, this was because European
forces were largely the ones pushing China to change in ways compat-
ible with European interests. However, given the comparisons Marx
was identifying between changes in China and Europe, it is worth
considering the relationship between Marx’s assessment of the decline
of the patriarchal state in China and the decline of the patriarchal
family in England.

4. Opium and Religion

In a later article about the opium trade in China, Marx adds that
“by persecuting the opium consumption as a heresy the Emperor gave
its traffic all the advantages of a religious propaganda” (2007c [1858],
30).8 Recalling his famous comparison that religion “is the opium of
the people” (1843), here Marx argues that opium is the religion of
the people: a powerful, compelling, and seditious narrative. In his
earlier Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx
explains that the state and society make religion “which is an inverted
consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world ” (1843).
While religion seems to protest the suffering caused by the state and
society, it is actually “the illusory happiness of the people,” in fact sanc-
tioning and supporting the state by preventing people from changing
their circumstances (1843). In this argument, metaphorical opium
works to quiet suffering and enable the exploited worker to continue
within the system. However, literal opium in China does not uphold
the exploitative system. In fact, the unrest caused by opium encour-
ages the fall of problematic social structures. Here, metaphorically,
the heretical opium trade works with a kind of religious force. In
this case, metaphorical religion is powerful as an expression against
systemic suffering. The religious narrative of the opium trade encour-
ages people towards subversion of their social structure.

8 And in fact, the suppression of opium in China increased demand for similar products like
morphine, which was introduced in China by Christian missionaries, “who used the drug
to win converts and gratefully referred to their morphine as Jesus opium” (Cockburn and
St. Clair, 1998).
386 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

Similarly, opium in England highlighted the decline of the bour-

geois family. What more visceral way could the failures of capitalism be
shown than in babies, murdered by their own mothers or caretakers?
For Marx, capitalism positively changed feudal structures of society
and production. But it also created internal contradictions that should
eventually lead to conflict and systemic change. If the destruction
of the paternal state in China was actually positive, so too was the
destruction of the bourgeois family structure by working-class women’s
participation in the workforce. For Marx, the contradictions produced
by the freedom and precarity of women in this system should lead to
more action to change these conditions. With increased economic and
social freedoms for women, children, too, would live longer, safer lives.
Tozzer Anthropology Building
Harvard University
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