“Think of Columbus, Cortez and Clive! Is there any greater or more satisfying endeavor for a young man than to expand his own fortunes while extending God’s dominion?” Ghosh has-to say the least-a less sanguine view of the nineteenth-century dope trade, which culminates in Flood of Fire in the conflagrations between China and Britain, but he is no less buoyant in exploiting the raw materials of the encounter to create complex geopolitical drama. “Blessed indeed are those, Reid, whom God chooses to be present at such moments in history!” a blustery opium tycoon tells an employee he is goading into the trade in Flood of Fire, the new and final volume of Ghosh’s 1,600-plus-page trilogy. The poppy changed the world of the nineteenth century. (To later nationalists, it would become known as year one in the “Century of Humiliation.”) And in India, the trade became so integral, accounting for nearly a fifth of its revenues, that its disruption might have led to the collapse of the colonial economy.

The First Opium War (1839–42) forced open Chinese ports and markets, bled the Chinese economy, and allowed Britain to add Hong Kong to its colonial possessions.

Twenty-five years later, Ghosh’s essay reads like a personal memo tacked to the wall of his writing studio as he composed his gargantuan “Ibis” trilogy, dedicated to another world-changing industry-the opium trade that linked Britain, India, and China and led to the war that transformed the economies and politics of all three countries, leaving an indelible mark on the map for the next century. But the story of fossil fuels had not found its place in serious fiction, despite its tantalizing offerings to would-be chroniclers-its “Livingstonian beginnings” in the Arabian sands, and its “city-states where virtually everyone is a ‘foreigner’ admixtures of peoples and cultures on a scale never before envisaged vicious systems of helotry juxtaposed with unparalleled wealth deserts transformed by technology, and military devastation on an apocalyptic scale.” Ghosh asserted that only a novelist eager to rise to the challenge of a “bafflingly multilingual” territory, a landscape featuring an intrinsically displaced, inordinately international atmosphere, could overcome the difficulties of writing about such a disorienting and cacophonous moment. Other globally disruptive enterprises-Ghosh’s preferred example is the spice trade-didn’t lack for a robust literary response, like the epic Portuguese poetry that sprang up alongside the discovery of a sea route to India. Twenty-five years ago, in a review of Abdelrahman Munif’s ambitious “petronovels,” Amitav Ghosh asked why fiction had proved so mute when it came to the momentous story of Middle Eastern oil.

Amitav ghosh trilogy