China’s place in the British Empire of Crime
Posted: October 11th, 2014 | No Comments »Browsing the book tent at the Wigtown Book Festival last week I came across this book I hadn’t heard of before – Tim Newark’s Empire of Crime: Organised Crime in the British Empire. Of course plenty of references to China, Hong Kong and especially Shanghai (Bill Fairbirn and the SMP, Big Eared Du, opium etc etc). Though readers of China Rhyming will be aware of most of these things the book does usefully show how Shanghai and China fitted into an “empire” of crime linking Cairo with India to China and so on as well as linking the British ending of the opium trade to the rise of the illicit narcotics business across the empire and wherever its tentacles reached.
Sometimes the best intentions can have the worst results. In 1908, British reformers banned the export of Indian opium to China. As a result, the world price of opium soared to a new high and a century of lucrative drug smuggling began. Criminal producers in other countries exploited the prohibition and gang wars broke out across South-East Asia. It was the greatest gift the British Empire gave to organised crime.
Empire of Crime introduces the reader to a whole new collection of heroes and villains, including pioneering narcotics investigator Russell Pasha, commandant of the Cairo police force; master criminal Du Yue-Sheng, drug lord of the Shanghai underworld; and tough North-West Frontier police chief Lieutenant-Colonel Roos-Keppel, nemesis of Afghan criminal gangs. Tim Newark weaves hidden reports, secret government files and personal letters together with first-hand accounts to tell the epic story of a global fight against organised crime.
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