The Royal Commission on Opium was a British Royal Commission that investigated the opium trade in British India in 1893–1895, particularly focusing on the medical impacts of opium consumption within India. Set up by Prime Minister William Gladstone’s government in response to political pressure from the anti-opium movement to ban non-medical sales of opium in India, it ultimately defended the existing system in which opium sales to the public were legal but regulated. History From the late eighteenth century until independence in 1947, opium was one of the chief sources of revenue for the British in India, raising more than custom duties, alcohol taxes, stamp charges, or the income tax and dwarfed only by taxes on the salt and land. The vast majority of that revenue was gained through the regulated export of processed opium from Calcutta or Bombay to China and to Southeast Asia. It was these exports of Indian opium that sparked the Opium Wars between the UK and China. The small proportion of opium that remained in India was sold under a licensed regime, with 10,118 shops selling opium to the general public across the subcontinent, with only one for every 21,000 people. These sales within India were termed "excise" by the colonial state. While they were a relatively small proportion of all opium produced, they grew in significance over the course of the nineteenth century as China began to grow more opium. In addition, they were seen as important by activists as part of the larger imperial system. Regulating opium more harshly in India was thought by those opposed to the opium trade to be a way of enabling further regulation of sales to East and Southeast Asia as well. While the early years of the Asian opium trade in the 1830s and 1840s saw some criticism of the trade in Britain, including by the Earl of Shaftesbury, it was not until the 1890s that the anti-opium shifted its attention to the harm opium was doing in India, rather than in China. On 10 April 1891, the anti-opium movement managed to get a motion passed in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom that urged an end to non-medical sales of opium in India, though with an amendment that would compensate the Government of India for any losses in revenue. Later, in 1893, under Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone's Liberal government, anti-opium pressures again prevailed