This is a brief guide to primary and scholarly resources related to economic history for students and faculty at Boston College.
Opium in World History
Derived from the unripe seed of the poppy, opium is commonly used as a narcotics and in analgesics. See the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World for a short discussion of the use and trade of opium in human history.
Drawing, paintings, ephemera, texts (in English, Chinese, etc.), and more related to "opium" from focused on the 17th to 20th centuries available on ARTSTOR.
Explores the cultural and trading relationships that emerged between America, China and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Includes manuscripts, rare printed sources, visual images, objects and maps from multiple US and Canadian archives and libraries.
Sources from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the British Library, London, provide a wide variety of original materials detailing China's interaction with the West from Macartney's first Embassy to China in 1793, through to the Nixon/Heath visits to China in 1972-74.
Encompassing some of the most influential American trading houses and leading individual traders of that era, these collections offer rich professional and personal perspectives into early Sino-American relations, as well as insight into the complexities of the business lives of American traders in the treaty ports.
Documents, illustrations, and ephemera from the 15th century onward related to "opium." Sources predominately in French from the French National Library.
Digitized Goldsmiths'-Kress Collection, drawn from the University of London and Harvard's Baker Library. Offers primary sources focused on "the dynamics of Western trade and wealth that shaped the world from the last half of the 15th century to the mid-19th century." Part II includes a supplement that extends coverage to 1914.
More than 200 curated texts (images and documents) from across the Eurasian continent that discuss or touch on opium from the 16th to the 20th centuries.
Access points for the Chinese Repository on the Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0. The periodical was published monthly in Guangzhou [Canton] between 1832 and 1851 for the use of Protestant missionaries working in Southeast Asia.
China. Inspectorate general of customs. Published by order of the inspector general of customs. Shanghai., Statistical department of the inspectorate general. China. Imperial maritime customs. 11. -Special series, no. 4 . Sir Robert Hart, inspector general.
Includes three collections focused on British foreign policy and diplomatic history: British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898-1914, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1918-1939, Documents on British Policy Overseas - beginning in 1945.
