Hey everyone! I was hoping you all could possibly help me out. I have to write a 10 page paper on how colonial products, such as sugar, of the British empire affected its economy and how those colonial products affected the lives of the British people in the mid 18th century.
I wanted to do this paper on opium when the East India Company went to India. Do you think I could pull this off, or should I just do something like tobacco, etc?
Could you do it? Sure. The opium trade was absolutely a product that had a huge impact on the lives of British people. However, the opium trade was intimately connected to the tea trade so you may want to consider doing something along the lines of tea-silver-opium and how these product are interconnected since they are probably difficult to separate from one another in a historical context.
EDIT: I wrote a little on opium, tea and silver here if you're interested.