The first recorded history of poppy cultivation in India in the 15th Century refers Cambay and Malwa as the places where it was grown.

During the Mughal Empire, poppy was grown on limited scale and it was an important article of trade with China and other Eastern countries.

Britain undertook the opium trade because of their chronic trade imbalance with China. There was tremendous demand in Britain for Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain pottery, but there was correspondingly little demand in China for British manufactured goods and other trade items.

Consequently, Britain had to pay for Chinese products with gold or silver. The opium trade, which created a steady demand among Chinese addicts for opium,solved this chronic trade imbalance.

In 1757, the monopoly of the cultivation of poppy passed into the hands of the East India Comany.

The East India Company encouraged cultivation of poppy over food crops. these lead to doubling of company profit by 1777.

However opium poppy cultivation for export reduced food availability and contributed to the famine of 1770 which led to the starvation of 10 million people in Bengal.

The bengali love for Aloo Posto was a direct result of this opium cultivation.

Huge amount of poppy seeds were a byproduct of opium cultivation in Bengal.

Faced with hunger the farmer’s wife experimented with dried out poppy seeds as a source of nourishment and found much to her delight that the seeds when ground to a paste exuded a nutty flavour, blended well with mustard oil and enhanced the frugal meals of leftover rice, or boiled potatoes. Thus was born the Bengali’s cherished posto.

The Ghazipur factory began life as the Benaras Opium Agency an entity of the East India Company, in 1820.

The opium processed at Ghazipur was sent to Calcutta for auction, then shipped to the south China coast and smuggled into the country via the port of Canton (now known as Guangzhou.

East India company did not directly deal this opium trade, but using their authority and power, they made other trading companies to sell opium to China.

They transferred the opium trade to the proxy of certain selected Indian companies.

The Parsis were quick to capitalise on the opium trade.

Rustomji Cowasji Banaji built a mighty commercial empire in the early 1800 based on opium trade and. Shipbulding.

Dhanjibhai Byramji and R.D. Mehta pumped money aquired through opium trade into cotton and jute industry their by becoming Calcutta’s wealthiest Citizens.

Dwarkanath Tagore founded Carr-Tagore company, an Anglo-Indian venture.

Earlier,Rustomjee Cowasjee had formed an inter-racial firm, but in the early 19th century,Parsis were classified as a Near Eastern community as opposed to South Asian by the British.

Carr-Tagore Company was one of those Indian private companies engaged in the opium trade with China.

The Marwaris also capitalised on opium trade. One of them was Tarachand Ghanshyamdas, which was a famous Marwari trading firm that flourished from 1791 to 1957.It is responsible for introduction of now famous Marwari clans from ‘Shekhawati’ to national and international business field.

Tarachand Ghanshyamdas had several branches in the opium tracts of Malwa and traded extensively in opium.

Regular opium futures trading by Marwari’s in Calcutta seems to have started in the 1830’s. It was in opium futures trade that several of the first Marwari fortunes were made.

By 1872 when telegraph services reached Jaipur. Calcutta Marwari merchants wired the current rates for opium to Jaipur. Agents in Jaipur used a system of mirrors to flash the rates from hilltop to hilltop.

From the final hill outside of Jhunjhunu a runner would come to the city and inform the merchants of the rates. At night, If the information needed to be supplied, gunpowder explosions were deployed along the same route.

Shivnarain Birla, grandfather of Ghanshyamdas Birla began his career was an independent opium speculator and for 10 years perfected the art of opium speculation in which he made large gains.

In 1896 four marwari firms, Devibaksh Jivanram, Ramnarain Bhojraj, Daulatram Lakshminarain and Shivnarain Baldeodas came together in a room at Kaligodam, Number 18,Mullick Street in Bara Bazaar to form ‘BareChaurastiya’ (the Gang of Four) who speculates in Opium.

Afeem Chaurasta Panchayat enjoyed complete juristicion on Marwaris engaged in the Opium trade.

This later took form of a Cartel led by Sarupchand Hukumchand and Harduttrai Chamaria which enjoyed complete monopoly on Opium trade.

Jardine, Skinner and Company was a trading company based in Calcutta. It was founded in 1825 and dealt into opium. It shipped opium to Jardine Matheson in China from Kolkata.

Apcar and Company was a firm founded in 1819. Arratoon Apcar moved his company to Calcutta around the end of 1830.

The Apcar clippers dominated the opium trade until the 1870s, carrying their cargoes from Bombay or Calcutta. From 1855 Apcar & Co. started to convert their fleet to steam.

In 1847, shortly after the Opium War P&O entered the opium trade; shipping 642,000 chests of Bengal and Malwa opium in the next eleven years.

The HSBC bank was created in 1865. The bank helped European merchants distribute opium across China, using Hong Kong as the trading hub.

The bank made huge profits by financing opium trade and facilitating repatriation of profit to Europe.

Thus we can conclude that the British used profits from sale of opium to build Empire.