This book is the first monograph dealing with the opium trade undertaken
by Dutchmen from Anatolia in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. The
trade began to flower from the 1820s onwards when the Dutch government
decided to commission the newly founded Dutch Trading Company with the
exclusive sale of the drug on the East Indian market. Because of the
large and growing consumption in the Indies, Holland became one of the
biggest drug dealers that has ever existed. Despite international
criticism of the opium trade and free opium consumption, Holland
continued to buy opium from Turkey and allow the consumption of the drug
in the Indies until 1942, when the occupation of Indonesia by the
Japanese army made this impossible.
Although studies have
been dedicated to the opium consumption in Indonesia and the Dutch
colonial drug policy, the commercial aspect of the purchase and
transport to the Indies has been almost completely neglected. The
archives of the Trading Company and the Colonial Ministry, on which this
study is mainly based, afford us a detailed insight into the trade as
well as into the connected subjects of Dutch-Ottoman (Turkish) shipping
and trade as well of the history of the Dutch colony of Izmir. The files
found in these collections and dealing with the purchase and transport
of the drug have seldom or never been studied before.