An Anatomy of Commerce and Consumption: Opium and Merchants at Batavia over the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This essay considers the commerce and consumption of opium at Batavia (modern Jakarta), on Java, and in the Indonesian Archipelago, from the later seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. It is a preliminary examination of the lesser known history of those merchants (Chinese and others) who made their livelihoods from purchasing bulk opium from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and re-distributing it commercially, and of the consumers who inhumed the opium. It utilizes two valuable new sources: a 1697 stele from the Ci Ji temple in south China, and Dutch debenture bonds (called obligatien) that recorded loans for the purchase of opium on credit (held in the Indonesian National Archives). Together they allow an analysis that, for the first time, can accurately identify Hokkien (and other) opium merchants and their closest commercial partners in eighteenth-century Batavia.