ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the historical conditions that made such a situation possible. It argues that matters of sovereignty, state formation and preservation, characteristic of those described by Hirst and Thompson, in relation to the formation of the modern system of states. The chapter explores the drawing on the extensive body of historical literature concerned with international drug control. The idea of reason of state has a long and at times ambiguous history a particularly significant reformulation of this political doctrine emerged towards the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, Britain through the East India Company attempted to initiate trade with China. While the Chinese had no desire or need for British goods or to cultivate external trade, the same was not the case for the English. The chapter has outlined a genealogy of the problematisation of the international supply of opium and its derivatives.
