This book is largely a shameful and ghastly history of death -- of the shriveled and slowly-wasting bodies of millions of Chinese addicts. The British Company's employees, the Bene-Israel Jews of Baghdad and Bombay, and the Americans of New England were family men, nearly all were conspicuously devout, well-educated for the time, and thoughtful -- yet they sustained this slaughter of their fellow human beings for nearly two centuries. The power of money stifled all other considerations.