Imperial Intoxication

Imperial Intoxication
Author: Gerard Sasges
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2017-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824866916

Making liquor isn’t rocket science: some raw materials, a stove, and a few jury-rigged pots are all that’s really needed. So when the colonial regime in turn-of-the-century French Indochina banned homemade rice liquor, replacing it with heavily taxed, tasteless alcohol from French-owned factories, widespread clandestine distilling was the inevitable result. The state’s deeply unpopular alcohol monopoly required extensive systems of surveillance and interdiction and the creation of an unwieldy bureaucracy that consumed much of the revenue it was supposed to collect. Yet despite its heavy economic and political costs, this unproductive policy endured for more than four decades, leaving a lasting mark on Indochinese society, economy, and politics. The alcohol monopoly in Indochina was part of larger economic and political processes unfolding across the globe. New research on fermentation and improved still design drove the capitalization and concentration of the distilling industry worldwide, while modernizing states with increasing capacities to define, tax, and police engaged in a never-ending search for revenue. Indochina’s alcohol regime thus arose from the same convergence of industrial potential and state power that produced everything from Russian vodka to blended Scotch whisky. Yet with rice liquor part of everyday life for millions of Indochinese, young and old, men and women, villagers and city-folk alike, in Indochina these global developments would be indelibly shaped by the colony’s particular geographies, histories, and people. Imperial Intoxication provides a unique window on Indochina between 1860 and 1939. It illuminates the contradictory mix of modern and archaic, power and impotence, civil bureaucracy and military occupation that characterized colonial rule. It highlights the role Indochinese played in shaping the monopoly, whether as reformers or factory workers, illegal distillers or the agents sent to arrest them. And it links these long-ago stories to global processes that continue to play out today.

The Age of Intoxication

The Age of Intoxication
Author: Benjamin Breen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812296621

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices—like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile—to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories—illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional—and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist. Focusing on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen examines the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. He then turns his attention to the British Empire, arguing that it owed much of its success in this period to its usurpation of the Portuguese drug networks. From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the cannabis that an East Indies merchant sold to the natural philosopher Robert Hooke in one of the earliest European coffeehouses, Breen shows how drugs have been entangled with science and empire from the very beginning. Featuring numerous illuminating anecdotes and a cast of characters that includes merchants, slaves, shamans, prophets, inquisitors, and alchemists, The Age of Intoxication rethinks a history of drugs and the early drug trade that has too often been framed as opposites—between medicinal and recreational, legal and illegal, good and evil. Breen argues that, in order to guide drug policy toward a fairer and more informed course, we first need to understand who and what set the global drug trade in motion.

Toxic Histories

Toxic Histories
Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2016-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107126975

An analysis of the challenge that India's poison culture posed for colonial rule and toxicology's creation of a public role for science.

Drugs and Empires

Drugs and Empires
Author: J. Mills
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2007-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN:

Drugs and Empires introduces new research from a range of historians that re-evaluates the relationship between intoxicants and empires in the modern world. It re-examines controversies about such issues as the Asian opium trade or the sale of alcohol in Africa. It addresses new areas of research, including the impact of imperial drugs profits on American history, or the place of African states in the development of international regulations. The outcome is to provoke new perspectives on both drugs and empires.

Vodka Politics

Vodka Politics
Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2014-02-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199389470

Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivan the Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself-a history that is drenched in liquor. Scrutinizing (rather than dismissing) the role of alcohol in Russian politics yields a more nuanced understanding of Russian history itself: from palace intrigues under the tsars to the drunken antics of Soviet and post-Soviet leadership, vodka is there in abundance. Beyond vivid anecdotes, Schrad scours original documents and archival evidence to answer provocative historical questions. How have Russia's rulers used alcohol to solidify their autocratic rule? What role did alcohol play in tsarist coups? Was Nicholas II's ill-fated prohibition a catalyst for the Bolshevik Revolution? Could the Soviet Union have become a world power without liquor? How did vodka politics contribute to the collapse of both communism and public health in the 1990s? How can the Kremlin overcome vodka's hurdles to produce greater social well-being, prosperity, and democracy into the future? Viewing Russian history through the bottom of the vodka bottle helps us to understand why the "liquor question" remains important to Russian high politics even today-almost a century after the issue had been put to bed in most every other modern state. Indeed, recognizing and confronting vodka's devastating political legacies may be the greatest political challenge for this generation of Russia's leadership, as well as the next.

Alcohol, psychiatry and society

Alcohol, psychiatry and society
Author: Waltraud Ernst
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1526159392

The medicalisation of alcohol use has become a prominent discourse that guides policy makers and impacts public perceptions of alcohol and drinking. This book maps the historical and cultural dimensions of the phenomenon. Emphasising medical attitudes and theories regarding alcohol and the changing perception of alcohol consumption in psychiatry and mental health, it explores the shift from the use of alcohol in clinical treatment and as part of dietary regimens to the emergence of alcoholism as a disease category that requires medical intervention and is considered a threat to public health.

Alcohol in the Maghreb and the Middle East since the Nineteenth Century

Alcohol in the Maghreb and the Middle East since the Nineteenth Century
Author: Elife Biçer-Deveci
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030840018

This book explores the significance of alcohol in the Middle East and Maghreb as a powerful catalyst of social and political division. It shows that the solidarities and polarities created by disputes over alcohol are built on arguments far more complex than oppositions on religion or consumption alone. In a region in which alcohol is banned by Islamic rules, yet allows its production and consumption, alcohol has always been contentious. However, this volume examines the different forms of social authority – religious, cultural and political – to offer a new understanding of drinking behaviours in the Middle East and North Africa. It suggests that alcohol, being at the same time an import and product of local industry, epitomises the tensions inherent to the conforming of Islamic societies to global trends, which seek to redefine political communities, social hierarchies and gender roles. The chapters challenge common misconceptions about alcohol in this region, arguing instead that medical discourses on alcohol dependency hide stances on national independence in an imperialist context; that the focus on religion also tends to conceal disputes on alcohol as a social struggle; and that disputes on inebriation are more about masculinity than judging private leisure. In doing so, the volume presents alcohol as a way of grasping the power relations that structure the societies of the Middle East and Maghreb.

Imperial Inequalities

Imperial Inequalities
Author: Gurminder K. Bhambra
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2022-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526166135

Imperial Inequalities takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare. In doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe’s global empires. The idea of ‘imperial inequalities’ provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities. This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces. Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world. These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue durée. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities

The Arts of the Microbial World

The Arts of the Microbial World
Author: Victoria Lee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2021-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 022681288X

The first in-depth study of Japanese fermentation science in the twentieth century. The Arts of the Microbial World explores the significance of fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, in Japanese scientific culture. Victoria Lee’s careful study documents how Japanese scientists and skilled workers sought to use the microbe’s natural processes to create new products, from soy-sauce mold starters to MSG, vitamins to statins. In traditional brewing houses as well as in the food, fine chemical, and pharmaceutical industries across Japan, they showcased their ability to deal with the enormous sensitivity and variety of the microbial world. Charting developments in fermentation science from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan was an industrializing country on the periphery of the world economy, to 1980 when it had emerged as a global technological and economic power, Lee highlights the role of indigenous techniques in modern science as it took shape in Japan. In doing so, she reveals how knowledge of microbes lay at the heart of some of Japan’s most prominent technological breakthroughs in the global economy. At a moment when twenty-first-century developments in the fields of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, and green chemistry suggest that the traditional eradication-based approach to the microbial world is unsustainable, twentieth-century Japanese microbiology provides a new, broader vantage for understanding and managing microbial interactions with society.

Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages

Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages
Author: Christian Scholl
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9783631706251

The volume examines imperial rule in the Middle Ages. It asks for the characteristics of imperial leadership as well as the reasons why some rulers strove for imperial titles such as emperor whereas others voluntarily shrank from them. Thus, the authors adopt a transcultural perspective, covering Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic Middle East.