Written by R.F. Kuang, Babel is a book about Robin Swift, a Cantonese boy brought to England to study English at Oxford's tower dedicated to language studies, Babel. The work is a historical fantasy, though it represents events exactly as they unfolded in reality. The trade deficit of silver England had with China and Lin Zexu's burning of opium in Guangzhou occurred just as they had in history books, only reworked to fit into the magic system and character's perspectives of events. It is an interesting choice by Kuang to create an alternative universe without alternative history.
Historically, the British Empire was obsessed with importing silks, teas, porcelain, and countless other goods from China. However, Chinese merchants had no interest in British goods, thus a trade deficit occurred where England was bleeding silver to meet its people's demands. In Babel, silver is the crux of the world's magic system, a bar of it used for each and every "spell". Kuang does not alter the worldbuilding, rather she recontextualizes it.
One of Robin's closest friends, Ramy, is a Muslim man from Kolkata, at one point in the story describing the British Empire's usage of the Bengal province for poppy fields. Another thing to note of Ramy is that when he is first introduced he is hinted to be a love interest for Robin, though Kuang does not develop the queer relationship. There are many possible reasons for this choice, the foremost likely being the level of danger there would be for two gay men of color to date in England. However, it reads more as a little easter egg the author put in the book to slightly boost its representation of queer people.
Moving back to historical events, Robin visits Guangzhou as a translator for an English merchant. There, he meets Lin Zexu, the governor, and speaks to him one-on-one. Zexu asks Robin to speak honestly about the merchants, and really the British's willingness to cooperate with China's opium ban. Robin says that they will never see the Chinese as human and therefore never respect their wishes, and soon after Zexu burned over 1,000,000kg of seized opium in the port. Again, history unfolds just as it had in our world, however, in Babel, it is now highly implied that Robin's actions directly influenced the decision to burn the opium, which in turn led to the First Opium War.
