Ibis trilogy
The Ibis trilogy is a work of historical fiction by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, consisting of the novels Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015).
[4] In Sea of Poppies, the Ibis sets off from Calcutta carrying indentured servants and convicts destined for Mauritius, but runs into a major storm and faces a mutiny.
[2] Flood of Fire culminates in the outbreak of the First Opium War and its impact across the Indian Ocean region,[1] including leading to the foundation of Hong Kong.
[7] The Ibis trilogy is set to the backdrop of the opium trade in China during the 1830s, which was causing widespread addiction in the country, but was a lucrative endeavour for British and American merchants.
[8][11] Beginning in 2004, he travelled to libraries across China, Hong Kong and Singapore to research the setting[9] and utilised his academic training as a social anthropologist for a historiographical approach to fiction writing.
[12] It took Ghosh 10 years to complete the series[4] and he conducted enough research during the writing process to publish several academic texts on Indian Ocean naval history.
[15] Ghosh uses the trade of opium as a narrative device to explore the history and legacy of the colonial era and describe people's everyday experiences of the British Empire.
[17] The series' themes stem from the asymmetrical relations that arose through the opium wars, including abundance and poverty, intimacy and exclusion, chance and fate, and authority.
[8] Alex Clark in The Guardian reviewed the trilogy positively, saying "[Ghosh] marshals the language of tiny details, from naval and military terminology to food and clothes and interiors, from boudoir to battlefield, in order to bolster our sense of how enormous and wide-ranging were the effects of this period of history, and of the unforgiving, brutalising opium trade in particular, how greatly it shaped international relations, communities and patterns of migration.
"[1] In South China Morning Post, James Kidd gave Flood of Fire five out of five stars, saying "few writers have combined popular and literary styles in a Hong Kong-set book better than Amitav Ghosh", and commended the series for its narrative, humour and exploration of realpolitik.
He suggests "one weakness of Ghosh’s first installment in the Ibis Trilogy is his failure to read Victorian primary sources with a sufficiently critical eye," but that he "remains a historiographical torchbearer who over much of his career has explored the past connections and convergences of the Indian Ocean world well ahead of the academic curve.
"[4] In March 2019, it was announced that a television series based on the books would be directed by Shekhar Kapur and produced by Artists Studio, part of Endemol Shine Group.
