Mode Collision and the Genesis of 'Addiction': the British-Qing Opium Conjuncture, 1780-1860

Keaton Pregozen, UC Berkeley Sociology

Medical historians trace the emergence of ‘addiction’ to late 19th-century Western professionalization (Berridge and Edwards [1987] 1999; Hickman 2004), treating it as a Western medical discovery. Rather than originating in medical science, I argue that 'addiction' emerged as a political category across multiple imperial sites before professionalization unified these fragmented practices into a seemingly coherent medical object. I examine the British-Qing opium conjuncture (~1780s-1860), where despite shared knowledge of opium's dependence-creating properties, actors generated irreconcilable projects for governing opium dependence. Drawing on Samir Amin's analysis of how modes of production generate structurally determined rationalities, I demonstrate that 'addiction' discourse served mode-specific reproductive requirements: reproducing capitalist accumulation required economistic naturalization of opium dependence, while reproducing tributary extraction required cosmic/moral legitimation of prohibition. These incompatible framings derived from structurally distinct forms of extraction that could not coexist without violent subordination of the tributary by the capitalist mode. Xu Naiji's 1836 legalization proposal, which advocated taxation over prohibition, revealed how incompatible modes governed opium dependence: legalization required economistic naturalization (dependence as market phenomenon, regulation through taxation), while prohibition required moralization (dependence as cosmic disorder, elimination through law). Recent scholarship (Mao 2018, Inoue 2011; see Gao 2020) shows the proposal's swift rejection reflected mode-level determination as officials overwhelmingly supported prohibition because tributary reproduction depended on cosmic and moral frameworks, not economic regulation. 'Addiction' emerged as the contested category naming this incompatibility: British naturalized dependence to justify trade while the Qing moralized it to justify prohibition. Reconciling these incompatible framings required mode transformation, achieved through the Opium Wars' violence. Late 19th-century medicalization unified such contradictory deployments without resolving the underlying structural antagonism, leading to today’s situation in which addiction policy inherits the contradictions of the concept’s violent past.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 190. Governing by Classification: Archives, Imperial Time, and the Long Life of Colonial Rule