structural:summarization
Opium trade

The British opium was produced in Bengal and in the Ganges river plain, where the British inherited an existing opium-industry from the declining Mughal Empire and identified the product as a potentially valuable export. The East India Company commissioned and managed hundreds of thousands of poppy plantations. It took care of the painstaking lancing of individual pods to obtain the raw gum, drying and forming it into cakes, before coating and packaging them for auction in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata). The Company tightly controlled the opium industry, and all opium was considered Company property until it was sold. From Calcutta, the Company's Board of Customs, Salt, and Opium concerned itself with quality control by managing the way opium was packaged and shipped. No poppies could be cultivated without the Company's permission, and the Company banned private businesses from refining opium. All opium in India was sold to the Company at a fixed rate, and the company hosted a series of public opium-auctions every year. The difference between the Company-set price of raw opium and the sale price of refined opium at auction (minus expenses) was profit made by the East India Company. In addition to securing poppies cultivated on lands under its direct control, the Company's board issued licences to the independent princely states of Malwa, where significant quantities of poppies were grown.