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.