Understand this imperishable fact and it becomes clear how the country fell so quickly to the Taliban over recent weeks.

The Afghan poppy has been an economic and political force for almost 150 years. As James Tharin Bradford explains in Poppies, Politics, and Power, its modern state was built in the late 1800s “in the shadow of poppy production”. But the emergence of the international drug control regime in the early 20^th century saw opium production banned. Afghanistan could no longer legally sell drugs, and as a result it lost a major source of state income as well as control over many of its rural areas, which relied on opium to survive and just carried on producing it regardless of the prohibition that Kabul was now obliged to enforce. For the first time the poppy came between the peripheries and central authority.

But then in 1979, the Soviets invaded — and opium production spiralled. The mujahedin that resisted Moscow needed cash to fight, and their make-up and available options meant they relied on two things: the rural economy and the global drug trade. Drug production may have remained illegal until 1992, but that didn’t stop Afghanistan becoming one of the most valuable opium suppliers in the world during the 1990s.

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Indeed, by 1999 the country produced 79% of the world’s illicit opium. Even when, a year later, the Taliban banned its production, it still accounted for 70%. Today, it remains the country’s most valuable cash crop worth $863 million, and the “industry” is the largest national employer with more than 500,000 people in the equivalent of full-time work.

Now that the Taliban are back, there are fears that Afghanistan’s drug production — which now also includes marijuana and increasingly methamphetamine — will explode. People are worried. “Taliban mulls flooding the West with heroin to shore up Afghan economy,” according to The Telegraph. What next?

It is important to understand what the Taliban is not: it is not a drug cartel and Afghanistan was never the narco-insurgency or state of popular imagination. The group’s views on opium are almost as variegated as the Talibs themselves. Some will tell you that Opium is haram, forbidden. The Taliban banned its production in 2000 on the grounds that it was not Islamic (though political motives were probably more important). But Islam can be flexible, if necessary. Even its most ardent commandants have a surprising amount of wiggle room; for example, if you’re starving, you can even permissibly consume the “donkey you cannot eat” (the pig).

Similarly for the Taliban, matters of religion — though never the fundamentals — can be shaped according to the economic and political realities on the ground. It is this ability that informs how they deal with opium, and, therefore, what is likely to come to Afghanistan, its neighbours and perhaps the West. It also explains how the group took control so quickly and what will characterise their rule if they are to hold on.

In Afghanistan, power does not automatically stem from the state — it is negotiated and bargained for. The nature of these negotiations is complex because they differ depending on the social, geographical and economic terrain of Afghanistan, which is incredibly varied. To rule there you must manage this problem by negotiating effectively. While former President Ashraf Ghani sat in Kabul trying to nation-build by spreadsheet and hanging out on Google Meets, the Talibs were out in the villages talking to who mattered and ladling out cash. It is this that enabled them to charge through Afghanistan without much resistance. They didn’t really defeat the Afghan army; they just made lots of deals.

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The mountains and rural areas — especially in the poppy-growing southwest of the country — are the constituencies that anyone who wants to govern must get on-side. It is not an easy task. As David Mansfield, an international expert on opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the author of A State Built on Sand, points out: these are tough people who will resist the interference of outsiders — including those in government in Kabul. “They do not like being told what to do,” he tells me. “Push them too hard and they will react. The Taliban has had to consolidate their position within those rural communities over time — which means respecting their economic interests” — integral to which is the poppy. Given the choice, there is no choice: opium farming is their default setting.

This had egregious consequences for effective central governance over the past 20 years. Take the case of the southern district of Nangarhar. Both Washington and Kabul were obsessed with building the Afghan National Army (ANA) as a means of securing the state and promoting national unity. Salaries were good, recruitment was aggressive. Mansfield explained to me that for every year that poppy production was banned from 2001 to the present day, more sons from the poppy-growing southern districts swelled the ranks of the ANA and the police.

The local Talibs were upset; they hassled people. But they always got the same response: “We have no love for the army or the state. My son will gladly leave the ANA tomorrow, but you will need to pay his salary — it supports our family.” It’s not that the farmers were especially loyal to the Taliban. They just disliked a government that wouldn’t let them farm and had no interest in dialogue or respecting their way of life — which, of course, left the path clear for someone who would do both.

So what did the Taliban do? They couldn’t kill everyone. Once again, they made deals. Sons could come back from the army to visit their towns and villages — but not in uniform and only at night. And, yes, ok: the villagers could grow poppies once again to earn money that way instead. This is what has been happening all these years. Negotiations and compromises like these — in a variety of forms — took place across the country and is just one reason why the ANA collapsed so quickly, and why the provinces did not resist the Taliban.

Now they are back in power. It seems unlikely the Taliban will risk alienating an important community based around an industry that some of their commanders have healthy financial interests in to boot. And even if the Talibs wanted to ban opium production they know it would not work. “Theoretically they can prohibit it, but that doesn’t mean they can control it,” says Mansfield. Then there are the political considerations: start your reign by giving orders that people ignore and watch the veneer of power crumble.

But what about after they have consolidated their hold on things? Once again, it depends. Right now, the price of opium is low. It doesn’t make much economic sense to start wide-scale production in the face of international opposition. Right now, the Taliban is still consolidating its power and — rhetorically at least — seeking relations with as many countries (Israel excepted) as possible. At the very least it makes sense not to alienate everyone immediately. But of course, if the economy collapses, if job in cities disappear and government jobs become fewer, not to mention the end of the multiplier effects of the aid economy as NGOs flee alongside Western powers, then things might look very different.

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And there is something else, too. An ODI report last month found that funding from international donors to Afghanistan’s remote provinces has been small, compared with the trade in legal and illegal goods that happens mostly off-the-books. In the southwestern Nimroz province, for example, money from Kabul amounts to about $20 million annually, whereas informal “taxation” from smuggling and other illegal activities raises about $235 million annually.

Crucially, as the authors note, “after the withdrawal of US and allied troops, money becomes the main instrument available to international partners during negotiations”. Simply put, cash is the only leverage we might have over the Taliban in future. But with so many hidden sources of it circulating, it could turn out to be not very much leverage at all. The Taliban could well prove to be beyond Western influence. If the group decides to sanction opium production once more, who will stop them?

Whatever happens, it will be informed not by international opinion but what the Afghans negotiate — or fail to — among themselves. Whether in the 1800s or the 1990s or the last 20 years of Western occupation, those who control Kabul do not control the periphery. As Mansfield concludes, “those in Kabul have to tread carefully. The provinces may be unruly, but they have their own way of doing things as everyone who has tried to govern over the last 40 years has discovered to their cost.”

Almost 20 years ago, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference that 90% of the drugs sold on British streets came from Afghanistan. He was looking for an excuse to invade, of course — but Afghan heroin had been a problem for Britain, and the world, for decades. We have reversed into the future. Once again it is not only the Taliban the West must now worry about in Afghanistan, but also the poppy — and the power it wields across the world.

The immensely deadly Taiping Rebellion between 1850 and 1864 and the vicious conflict between ‘Hakka’ and ‘Cantonese’ peoples between 1855 and 1867 are barely known outside China, despite their far bloodier impacts on human lives. We know vastly more about the ‘First Opium War’ of 1840 because it has played a totemic role in two political arenas: one in China and one in the UK. And in both places, the origins of the war have been obscured and distorted to suit political agendas.

In China, the ‘Opium War’ marks the beginning of what the Communist Party currently calls the “century of national humiliation” — a period of unrelenting misery that only ended in 1949 with the Party’s victory in the Chinese Civil War. It is a narrative that underpins both the Party’s right to rule China and its increasingly assertive foreign policy. In Britain, the narrative of the war has been a weapon wielded variously by Liberal critics of a Whig government, puritan campaigners against drugs, leftist opponents of British foreign policy and Twitter-users claiming that white people are inherently racist. All these critiques and narratives caricature the evidence.

In the comic-book version, the British Empire went to war in 1840 to force an illegal and immoral drug, opium, down the respiratory passages of the Chinese people, purely for its own ill-gotten ends. This narrative is oddly patronising. It assumes that the Chinese side were merely naïve dupes, hapless victims to imperial power. It is time to recognise that there were several protagonists in the First Opium War.

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On one side were the British free-traders, men who wanted an end to Chinese restrictions on commerce, whether of cotton or opium. There was also an East India Company anxious to maintain its good relations with local officials, and a London government and its critics with their own agendas. On the other was an imperial court in Beijing split between reformers and a clique of Chinese conservative ‘scholar-officials’ intent on keeping foreign influence at bay. In the middle was an Asian financial problem triggered by a European war.

At the beginning of the 19th century, opium was seen in China as a cure-all for everything from stomach problems to plague. Although imports had been restricted and poppy cultivation banned in 1729, its medicinal use continued to be legal.[1]When a cholera pandemic hit China in the 1820s there was a huge increase in demand for a drug believed to stop diarrhoea. Others procured it to reduce the symptoms of malaria. Regardless of imperial edict, poppy was being grown in the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Shanxi, Guizhou, Zhejiang and Manchuria by the 1830s and the drug was being widely smoked.[2]

This period was a time of crisis for the Qing Empire. Its population had more than doubled over the previous century while the area of land under cultivation had risen only by half. Unsustainable use of the land caused declines in soil fertility, increased erosion and downstream flooding. Food became more expensive, work became scarce, and corruption and mismanagement made things worse. Millions of peasants were already going hungry. Serious rebellions broke out in several provinces. And to cap it all, the Napoleonic wars triggered revolutions in the Spanish Americas that disrupted the flow of reliable silver coinage to Asia. The result was shortages of currency, deflation and economic depression.[3]

Foreign traders had previously made fine profits from the silver trade. Because Chinese traders preferred silver pesos while people outside China preferred silver bullion, there was money to be made in arbitrage: exchanging one for the other. The economic historian Alexandra Irigoin has shown how it was the shortage of reliable coins in East Asia after 1828 that triggered a search for alternative trading goods and the free-traders’ turn towards opium.

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The Chinese imperial court needed scapegoats for its failures, and it found them in opium and foreigners. As the American historian James Polachek discovered, documents from the period make clear that conservatives turned arguments over opium into weapons to weaken reformers. While some in the imperial court wanted to open up trade to relieve the economic crisis, others — notably a group of conservative intellectuals calling themselves the ‘Spring Purification Circle’ were trying to try to close it off from the outside world.[4]

In May 1836, alarmed by the explosion of smuggling and corruption caused by the opium ban, the court had actually come close to legalising its import, but the proposal was blocked by the conservatives. The Spring Purification Circle then engineered the appointment of one of their own, an ambitious official called Lin Zexu, as Governor-General of Guangdong, the region where foreign trade — and opium smuggling — were concentrated. In Polachek’s words, “Lin was playing at the game of foreign policy essentially for domestic political purposes”.[5]

The result of all these rival agendas was a local clash in Canton between groups with their own special interests that ultimately ignited a small war. In June 1839, in the middle of negotiations with the British trade superintendent, Governor Lin unilaterally destroyed 20,000 chests of opium As the sinologist Julia Lovell has pointed out, the superintendent — Charles Elliott — found himself in a situation where he felt obliged to defend British subjects even though they were engaged in a trade that he personally opposed. Until this point, the arguments had been over the merits and demerits of opium. Now they were over the freedoms of Britons overseas, the ‘right’ to trade and the honour of the country.

Back in London, an embattled Whig government was under pressure from Tories and Liberals in Parliament, from Chartists and rioting miners in the streets, and from insurrections in several colonies. There were already those in Britain seeking a ban on opium (a ban that would not be introduced until the First World War) and for them the trouble in the east was a useful addition to their arsenal of complaints about the drug. For its critics, the government’s decision to send a military force to China was, to quote William Gladstone, a “permanent disgrace”. The actual details of what triggered the conflict and whether the response was justified were less important than the moral certainty provided by taking a position on one side or the other.

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It was in the interests of them all to vilify their opponents, whether at home or abroad. Depending on which version of the cartoon you are watching, Britain was either progressive and enlightened or evil and predatory; China was either backward and deserving of a bloody nose or noble and innocent. It is easy to see why the tired old narratives linger on: they still play useful purposes today.

It was only in the 20th century that the First Opium War was elevated to its present iconic status. In the 1900s, nationalists deliberately stoked feelings of ‘national humiliation’ to undermine the geriatric Qing Dynasty. In the 1940s, Communists extended the narrative into a ‘Century of National Humiliation’ to undermine their Nationalist rivals. And in the years since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, the Communist Party has carefully nurtured this narrative of historic humiliation through its ‘Patriotic Education Campaign’.

Under Xi Jinping’s rule, the campaign has been turbocharged. Xi invoked the Opium War when he launched his grand ‘China Dream’ vision in 2012, again at the most recent Party Congress in 2017; and on many occasions since. For the Party, the war is a defeat that keeps on delivering victory.

Successful as it has been for the Communist Party inside China, this narrative of resentment is achieving the opposite outside the country. China’s neighbours, and countries in the West, are increasingly wary of a regime that tries to mobilise anti-foreign sentiment to reinforce the idea of a nation ‘under siege’. The international Pew survey released this week suggests more than three quarters of people in South Korea and Japan have negative views of China. Concerns have soared to similar levels in France, Germany and Britain too. And it is hard to see how international opinion will shift in China’s favour if its leadership continues to base its right to rule on resentment over a 180-year-old war.

Bill Hayton is the author of ‘The Invention of China’, published this month by Yale University Press

[1] Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann & Zhou Xun, ‘Narcotic Culture: A Social History of Drug Consumption in China’ in British Journal of Criminology, (2002) 42, 317–336 [2] Joseph G. Alexander, ‘The Truth about the Opium War’, The North American Review, Sep., 1896, Vol. 163, No. 478, p382 [3] Irigoin, Alejandra, ‘A Trojan Horse in Daoguang China? Explaining the Flows of Silver In and Out of China’, LSE Working Paper No. 173/13, London School of Economics, 2013 [4] Polachek, James M., The Inner Opium War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 [5] Polachek pp134-5