David A. Guba Jr. Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France; Benjamin Breen. The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade.

Abstract

Two exciting new books, David Guba Jr.’s Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France and Benjamin Breen’s The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, trace the rise of the globalized drug economy in Western Europe and its relationships to colonial empire (1600–1900), connecting Europe to the Americas, Africa, and India, and to the construction of drugs in European ­imaginaries. These cultural histories describe drugs as social ­constructs, embedded in specific Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French ideas of race, politics, law, colonial empire, and commerce. We discover ­cultural reasons why some pharmacodynamic plants have become lawful medications and others illegal drugs, and how European publics experienced the expansion and ­globalization of pharmacy from the early modern period to the present. A feast for the mind and a delight to the eye, Breen’s intellectually ambitious The Age of Intoxication takes the reader on a world tour of...