Free Speech™ and the Opium Wars
When a moral argument becomes a trade doctrine and a practical application of the Rent Theory of Political Identity
A follow up to two articles, plus the latest incident in Venezuela and the sanctions imposed on Thierry Breton of the EU by the USA government.
The Betrayal of Ukraine: Peace, Power, and the Price of Electricity
Apologies, this is a rushed article. The ridiculous charade of the Trump Peace Plan needs to be destroyed. Permanently.
In the mid-19th century, Britain went to war with China to defend a principle.
That principle was called free trade.
The commodity was opium.
The Qing state attempted to restrict the import of a drug that was destabilising its society, economy, and institutions. Britain responded not by debating the harms, but by reframing the issue: this was not about addiction or sovereignty, but about market access. When China persisted, Britain enforced its position militarily.
The Opium Wars are often remembered as a colonial aberration, a moral failure tied to a different era. That framing is comforting. It allows us to believe the underlying logic no longer applies.
It does.
From Opium to Outrage
Today’s commodity is not a drug or a mineral. It is political identity, packaged, amplified, and monetised at scale.
The argument used to defend it is called Free Speech™.
This is not free expression in the constitutional sense. It is not a defence of dissent against authoritarianism. It is a trade doctrine: a moralised justification for protecting a profitable distribution system from regulation.
The parallels are uncomfortably precise.
Opium was defended as commerce, not coercion
Tobacco was defended as choice, not addiction
Oil is defended as security, not dependency
Political outrage is defended as free speech, not rent extraction
In each case, the harms are reframed as secondary to the principle, until the principle becomes indistinguishable from the revenue stream it protects.
Platforms as Infrastructure, not Publishers
Social media platforms are often described as neutral intermediaries. This description no longer holds.
At scale, they function as infrastructure for monetised political identity:
audiences are directly owned,
escalation is algorithmically rewarded,
moderation is selectively framed as censorship,
and income flows independently of electoral outcomes.
This has created a new class of actors: not politicians in the traditional sense, but retail political entrepreneurs (e.g. Nigel Farage) whose livelihood depends on maintaining narrative intensity.
Once enough people, creators, movements, campaigns, and adjacent businesses, depend on this income, the system becomes politically sensitive. At that point, regulation is no longer treated as consumer protection. It is treated as economic aggression.
This is now that historical inflection point.
When the State Steps In
In every previous case, opium, tobacco, oil, the decisive moment was not the discovery of harm, but the entry of the state as defender of the market.
The moment regulation threatens cashflow at scale, the language shifts:
from harm to rights,
from governance to freedom,
from oversight to attack.
What we are now seeing is the same transition applied to the platform economy. Regulation of large US platforms (X, Meta, Truth Social, Google and Amazon) is increasingly framed not as domestic policy or international coordination, but as an assault on national values and sovereignty.
This is why authoritarian censorship rarely features in these debates. It does not threaten the revenue base.
European and British regulation does.
Free Speech™ as a Trade Argument
“Free Speech™” now performs the same function “free trade” did in the 19th century:
it moralises market access,
delegitimises local regulation,
and converts economic interest into ethical necessity.
This does not require conspiracy, coordination, or bad faith. It is the predictable outcome of incentives.
Once political identity becomes a monetisable commodity, defending its distribution becomes indistinguishable from defending the market itself.
Why This Matters
The Rent Theory of Political Identity reframes several things we currently struggle to explain:
why political positions harden after electoral defeat
why movements persist without policy success
why extremity is rewarded over compromise
why foreign regulation triggers geopolitical retaliation
why de-escalation becomes structurally difficult
It also explains why moral appeals fail. You cannot reason someone out of a position that pays their rent.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
The lesson of the Opium Wars is not simply that Imperial Britain behaved badly.
It is that states will defend profitable systems long after their social costs are understood, provided those systems are framed as principles rather than products.
We are now at that stage with monetised political identity.
The question is no longer whether this market distorts democracy, that is increasingly obvious. The question is whether democratic states are willing to treat it as an economic problem rather than a cultural one.
History suggests that delay is the default.
And delay has a cost (a big one), with Greenland, Iceland and the UK right in the crossfire between the two main protagonists, the USA and the EU.
Replace the word opium with “the cocaine wars”