Description:
From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the inebriating cannabis that East Indies merchants sold in coffeehouses, drugs have been entangled with science and commodification for five centuries. The Age of Intoxication explores the origins, and continuing impact, of the first global era of drugs.
Review Quotes: "
This book effectively challenges the historical concept of 'The Age of Reason' to describe the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as instead 'The Age of Intoxication.' [A] provocative volume...Breen ultimately reconstructs the rise of drugs, both licit and illicit, and their entanglement with the rise of global capitalism and empire [and] illustrates how modern societies hold fears of certain drugs and not others.
"-- "Journal of Modern History"