The Poppy War Trilogy
R.F. Kuang
Harper Voyager: 2018–2020
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Babel, or the Necessity of Violence
R.F. Kuang
Harper Voyager: 2022
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In The Burning God, the final volume of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy, Rin gazes upon the glistening skyline of the New City, a space of gleaming architecture where each building represents a calculated slice of order. Yet there’s a decay buried deep within the urban sprawl. “Six months. Six months, and the Hesperians had transformed a riverside municipality into something like this,” Rin thinks. “How long would it take them to reconfigure the entire nation?”

This tension—the duality of the promise of ‘civilisation’ and the destructive history that underpins it—runs through both The Poppy War and Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, offering fierce critiques of colonialism that feel all too familiar in the age of neocolonial economics.

The Poppy War follows Rin, a war orphan who earns a place at Sinegard Academy, an elite military school in the fictional empire of Nikan. Described as “an imposing gray wall topped by a three-tiered pagoda”, Sinegard is grand. Yet even its grandeur is dwarfed by the arrival of the Hesperians, who bring changes akin to surgically implanting a piece of Hesperia into Nikan’s body.

The Hesperians build New City in Abarak, an old Nikara city with more than a thousand years of history. But Rin recognises nothing familiar to her land or culture as she walks down the streets: “She saw no lanterns, no wall banners, no sloping pagoda roofs or latticed windows.” It’s all been replaced by a cityscape of glass with “stained illustrations depicting scenes she did not recognise”. Hung around the city are lists of rules for the “Maintenance of Social Order”.

Rin is used to the hard power of the Hesperians but had “never considered that this alternate form of soft erasure might be far worse”. Although the Nikara outnumber the Hesperians about five to one, the people Rin observes appear completely unfazed by the intrusion of these foreign rulers. They greet the newcomers, sell Hesperian food from their carts and even start learning the Hesperians’ language. But these welcoming attitudes aren’t rewarded with respect, because the colonisers had never intended it to be a meeting of equals.

In a 2023 essay titled ‘How Colonialism Instilled Inferiority Complexes in Africans’, Takudzwa Hillary Chiwanza, a Zimbabwean writer and lawyer, observed that resource plundering, systemic violence and even genocide were tools used by colonisers to maintain political power and control. But physical violence alone wasn’t enough to keep people compliant, so a simultaneous psychological war had to be waged, brainwashing colonised peoples into believing that their oppressors were just inherently better.

“By rejecting their culture and history, Africans had to adopt the strangely alienating cultural belief systems of the European colonizers,” Chiwanza writes. “The cosmological understanding of society that Africans intrinsically possessed was brutally undermined, and was replaced, with violent intrusion, by Europeanized ‘modernity’.”

This ‘soft’ violence is central not just to The Poppy War but also to Babel, Kuang’s alternate-history novel set in an 1830s Oxford where language has been weaponised for empire-building. The biracial protagonist, Robin Swift, is plucked from a plague-stricken Canton as a child and raised by a British professor. His half-Chinese, half-English features mean he has an easier time blending in than friends of South Asian or African descent. Spared from the worst of repeated racist and sexist attacks, Robin finds it harder to reconcile the vile underground of empire with the nation he previously identified as having saved him from disease and poverty. He doesn’t realise until much later that the system that ‘rescued’ him is also exploiting and destroying his homeland, particularly through violent campaigns like the Opium Wars.

[dropcap]In the early nineteenth century, the British East India Company exported opium from its Indian colonies to China to address a trade imbalance between the British—who were eager for silk, porcelain and tea—and the Chinese, who were less interested in British goods and wanted to be paid in silver. This led to a rise in addiction to the narcotic, which the Qing government tried to counter by banning opium in 1796. Matters escalated in 1839 when Chinese officials seized and destroyed large amounts of opium from foreign traders; these tensions eventually led to the First Opium War that lasted from 1839 to 1842, ending with the Treaty of Nanking that forced China to open up to more foreign trade, pay reparations for both the seized opium and the war, and cede Hong Kong to British colonial control.

Babel draws heavily on this history. In Kuang’s alternative world, Britain runs and thrives on magic bars of silver. These highly sought-after bars are inscribed with “match-pairs”—two words in different languages that have similar, but not identical, meanings. It is what’s “lost in translation” between the two tongues that generates potent magic, powering everything from transportation to weaponry. By the time Robin arrives at Oxford’s Royal Institute of Translation, the British have more or less wrung all the magic out of match-pairs derived from European languages, making the use of “exotic” languages an area of increasing focus. Brought in to specialise in Mandarin, Robin quickly befriends other members of his cohort: Ramy from India, Victoire from Haiti and Letty, the daughter of a white British admiral.

Babel exposes colonialism as a system of extraction, and its focus on language reminds us that material goods aren’t the only things colonisers expropriate. The British hold the indigenous communities they seek to dominate in contempt even as they desire their goods and rely on the magic generated by their languages to power ships, heal bodies and improve agricultural productivity. As Ramy says: “How strange. To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.”

Literary works have long served as powerful tools for understanding the injustices that official histories often misrepresent—if they are represented at all. Things Fall Apart, the 1958 debut novel of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, explores the disruption of traditional Igbo society through the story of Okonkwo, a respected warrior and leader. Through Achebe’s writing, we’re introduced to an Igboland with existing political, religious and social structures, but Okonkwo, like The Poppy War’s Rin, stands at the precipice of a world that no longer exists. While Rin witnesses the transformation of Nikan under Hesperian occupation, Okonkwo experiences the methodical dismantling of Igbo governance systems that had functioned effectively for generations. Meanwhile, in Babel,   it dawns upon Robin that he’s been manipulated into creating the very thing that allows the British to subjugate his people.

In Kuang’s novels, colonisers and imperialists disrupt established systems by impoverishing populations with drugs and economic theft. Through these stories, we learn to identify a tried-and-tested formula: destroy an established system, present yourself as the solution, keep it broken—and therefore beholden to you—forever.

This formula is still present in international relations today, manifesting in economic policies, disaster capitalism and humanitarian interventions that preserve unjust hierarchies. We see this in Gaza at the moment; there are colonial fingerprints all over the history of conflict between Israel and Palestine, yet Western powers are either slow to respond or actively complicit in Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing. In other instances, financial support is offered—through national aid agencies or institutions like the International Monetary Fund—to Global South nations with conditions and fees that make escape from debt nearly impossible. To make things worse, these unfair systems are sometimes exacerbated by acts of cultural imperialism that erode indigenous narratives, or the presence of local leaders who enrich themselves while looting national resources.

It is only when we recognise these unjust structures that we can begin the work of dismantling them and building truly equitable global systems. Kuang’s writing makes us see how racism, prejudice, occupation, war, manipulation and resource extraction have shaped the global power dynamics we still grapple with today.

In today’s hyper-connected, chronically online world, the proliferation of information and disinformation makes it increasingly difficult to puzzle out truths. In Kuang’s work we find a deliberate excavation of histories long buried or distorted, revealing not only the violence of the past but also the way it continues to shape the present.

If history is written by the victors, then literature is the rebellion of the defeated. In these pages, we find that the worlds we’ve lost might not have been primitive at all—they were just inconvenient to the oppressor.

• Tags: China, Free to read, Issue 40, R.F. Kuang, Victoria Audu