Global Asias Workshop-Seminar (SPRING 2026)
Wednesday, January 28, 9:00 am–10:15 am ET on Zoom
A Hong Kong Legend: Haji Mohamed Hasan Nemazee and the Rebirth of "the Death Traffic" in Britain's Asian Empire, 1893-1921
Andrew Bellamy (History-NB)
Respondent: Arpita Biswas (WGSS-NB)
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SPRING 2026 Seminar Members:
Cai Barias (American Studies-NB/PSci UMass); Andrew Bellamy (History–NB); Arpita Biswas (WGSS-NB); Rose Cuizon-Villazor (Law-Newark); Anusha Iyer (Childhood Studies-Camden); Mich Ling (WGSS-NB)
Convener: Allan Punzalan Isaac (American Studies; English–NB)
A Hong Kong Legend: Haji Mohamed Hasan Nemazee and the Rebirth of "the Death Traffic" in Britain's Asian Empire, 1893-1921
Abstract: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-opium activists worldwide pressured Britain’s imperial government to end what Rabindranath Tagore vividly described as “the death traffic” – the lucrative opium trade between British India and Qing China. Yet a successor soon emerged in the Persia-China opium trade at the behest of the Hong Kong-based shipping magnate and philanthropist Haji Mohamed Hasan Nemazee. Rebuilding Nemazee’s overlapping business and social worlds, this paper argues that he developed this trade and evaded consequences for his role in it because of, not despite, his standing as a devoted, loyal subject of an empire now committed to suppressing this trade. Nemazee’s story thus reveals the surprising, high-stakes continuities underlying the otherwise profound rupture of the British Empire’s renunciation of the opium trade and its ill-gotten gains.
Bio: Andrew Bellamy is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at Rutgers University, trained in modern European history, global/comparative history, and the history of drugs. His dissertation Defying Gravity: The Namazi Family and the Persian Opium Trade in the Era of Prohibition explores the diverse and surprising afterlives of the intra-Asian opium trade by telling the story of the Namazi family, a family of Persian merchants who were at once prosperous businessmen, respected community leaders, generous philanthropists, loyal imperial subjects, and prolific opium traders at a time when these identities could officially no longer coexist. His work has been supported by the Alcohol and Drug History Society, the University of Bristol’s Hong Kong History Centre, and the Rutgers School of Graduate Studies, among others.