At once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural, Smoke and Ashes traces the transformative effect the opium trade has had on Britain, India and China, as well as on the world at large, over the centuries. Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, several of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions -- and connected intrinsically to contemporary globalism, and even his own family history. Moving deftly between horticulture, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Smoke and Ashes reveals the pivotal role one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know it-one teetering on the edge of catastrophe.