Drugs and their illicit use have long fascinated writers and the public at large. Informed by new interdisciplinary perspectives, a growing number of academically trained historians are now approaching drugs as a wide-open topic for serious research. This Handbook of Global Drug History is the first major attempt by historians of drugs to take stock of the recent progress and directions of this field, utilizing both a global scope and long-term historical perspective. Thirty-five original essays simultaneously survey what is known historically about drugs across the world (in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa) as well as illustrating their historical interconnections. The use of drugs in human culture goes back millennia with as many unique histories as cultures in which drugs were used. In the early modern world, human relationships with drugs changed, and drugs connected societies through transnational trade. In the nineteenth century, these diverse histories converge in defining the modern
Acknowledgements Introduction: A New Global History of Drugs, Paul Gootenberg Part I. Ancient Drug Worlds 1. Africa: The Forgotten Drug Continent, Neil Carrier 2. Psychoactive Drugs in European Prehistory, Elisa Guerra-Doce 3. Plant Drugs and Shamanism in the Americas, Henrique S. Carneiro 4. Ancient American Civilizations, States, and Drugs, Stacey Schwartzkopf 5. Soma and Drug History in Ancient Asia, Davide Torri Part II. Precolonial to Colonial Drug Trades and Cultures 6. The New Imperial Drug Trades, 1500-1800, Benjamin Breen 7. Tobacco's Cultural Shifts as an Early Atlantic Drug, Marcy Norton 8. Forbidden Drugs of the Colonial Americas, Martin Nesvig 9. Mind-Altering Drugs in Premodern India, James McHugh 10. Drugs in Africa from the Slave Trade to Colonialism, Charles Ambler Part III. The Nineteenth-Century Transition to Dangerous Drugs 11. Dangerous Drugs from Habit to Addiction, Timothy Hickman 12. Middle East Drug Cultures in the Long View, Haggai Ram 13. Colonialism, Consumption, and Drug Control in Asia, James H. Mills 14. The Cultural Biography of Opium in China, Yangwen Zheng 15. French Drug Control from Poison to Degeneration, Sara Black Part IV. Modern Prohibitions and its Drug Culture Aftermaths 16. The Creation and Impact of Global Drug Prohibitions, David Bewley-Taylor 17. Origins and Outcomes of a US Medicine-Drug Divide, David Herzberg 18. Interwar Drug Scenes and Restrictive Regulation in Britain, Christopher Hallam 19. The Making of Pariah Drugs in Latin America, Isaac Campos 20. Modern Russian and Soviet Drug Suppression, Pavel Vasilyev 21. Germany's Role in the Modern Global Drug Economy, Robert Stephens 22. Drugs, Nation, and Empire in Japan, 1890s-1950s, Miriam Kingsberg-Kadia Part V. Illicit Drugs Traffic and the Modern War on Drugs 1--The Global North. The United States and Europe 23. The Globalization of US Drug Enforcement, Mathew R. Pembleton 24. Illicit Drug Cultures in the Postwar United States, Nancy D. Campbell 25. The Impact of the US Drug War on People of Color, Samuel K. Roberts 26. The French Connection as an Illicit Trade Network, Alexandre Marchant 2--The Global South. Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa 27. Latin American and Caribbean Drug Trafficking Groups, Enrique Desmond Arias 28. Turkey and the Formation of the Global Heroin Trade, Ryan Gingeras 29. Deorientalizing Drugs in the Modern Middle East, Maziyar Ghiabi 30. The Origins of Drug Trafficking Networks in China, Kathryn Meyer 31. The Post-1950s Rise of Illegal Opium in Asia, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy 32. West Africa and the Modern Global Drug Trades, Gernot Klantschnig Part VI. Current Dilemmas with Global Illicit Drugs 33.Twenty-First Century Global Drug Trades and Consumption, James Tharin Bradford 34. Global Drug Debates in the Twenty-First Century, Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch and Summer Walker 35. Drugs. Lessons from History?, Virginia Berridge Contributors
Paul Gootenberg is a Latin Americanist and commodity studies specialist and a pioneer in the field of global drug history. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York and Chair of the Department of History. His books include Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, and he is the editor of Cocaine: Global Histories and, with Liliana M. Dávalos, The Origins of Cocaine: Peasant Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes. He has also published extensively on the economic and social history of nineteenth-century Peru.
Reviews for The Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History
This is a serious collection that does not mind taking a few odd turns, as you would expect in a history of mind-altering substances. * Dave Hazzan, BC Studies Book Reviews * Paul Gootenberg's introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History sets out to take stock of what is known of the history of illicit drugs and of the field of drug history. This task is amply completed in the thirty-five comprehensive and informative chapters that follow. Each contributor expertly situates drug history and historiography within broader social, economic, and political contexts. * Isis, volume 114 *
- Winner of Selected as a Best Historical Material by the Committee of the Reference and User Services Association 2023.
