Soon there were so many American merchants in Izmir that they were able to monopolize the shipping of Turkish opium to China. But the output of the Turkish industry was not large, and the opportunities in India were simply too great to be missed. So even as they were setting up the traffic in Turkish opium, some Americans also began eyeing the East India Company’s auctions in Bengal. In 1804, Charles Cabot, captain of a Boston-owned ship, declared, “I intend to purchase Opium at the Company’s sales & proceed to the eastward where I have no doubt of being first at market.”
Those early attempts to tap the Indian market foundered initially because of the disruptions caused first by the Napoleonic Wars and then by the British-American War of 1812. But after that war ended in 1815, Americans began to expand their dealings in opium at a rapid rate. John Jacob Astor even sent a ship into the Persian Gulf in an attempt at finding another source to supplement the supplies from Turkey. Astor’s speculations in opium in this period were large enough to send tremors down his rivals’ spines. “We know of no one but Astor we fear,” declared the Boston firm that then dominated the Turkish market.
By 1818, Americans were, by some estimates, smuggling as much as a third of all the opium consumed in China, thereby posing a major challenge to the East India Company’s domination of the market. Indeed, competition from Americans, and their Turkish opium, was one of the reasons that the company ramped up its production in Bihar soon after.
Meanwhile, India continued to be by far the greatest source of profits in the opium trade, and American merchants remained eager to expand their reach into the Indian traffic: The fact that they were shut out of it only whetted their appetites. And it was not as if the Americans did not hold some winning cards of their own. Marketing Turkish opium in China had put them in a good position to act as agents for Indian businessmen; they knew the ins and outs of the trade and had acquired extensive contacts within smuggling networks. They also had their own receiving ships at Lintin Island, on the Pearl River, where they could offer to store their partners’ drug consignments at lower rates than those of the big British smuggling networks. Moreover, their connections with the business worlds of Bombay and Calcutta went back a long way, to the years immediately following the formal recognition of American independence in 1783.