Poverty in India Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, were dedicated to producing poppy and opium, which were then exported to southeast and east Asia particularly China, with the trade an exclusive monopoly first of East India Company, and later the colonial British institutions. The economic importance of this shift from industry to agriculture in India was large; by 1850, it created nearly 1,000 square kilometres of poppy farms in India in its fertile Ganges plains, led to two opium wars in Asia, with the second opium war fought between 1856 and 1860. After China accepted opium trade, the colonial government dedicated more land
An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China nations, the collapse of China, British domination of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, malevolent misunderstanding between the West and the Third World in the twentieth." Other historians such as Joanna Waley-Cohen and Benjamin A. Elman argue for a more complex dynamic between England and China well into the 19th century. Kenneth Pomeranz refers to Staunton´s account to highlight the economic similarities between China and the West and argues that the Chinese disadvantage of energy-generating resources and the European access to the New World caused the divergence between East and West rather than cultural miscommunication. An Authentic Account of an