Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication is a profoundly ambitious project historicizing centuries of drug use and commodification across the globe. Tracing opium, quina, tobacco, and sugarcane, among other “drugs,” across imperial lines, Breen asks how and why certain substances became identifiably “legal” or “illegal” in our modern world (p. 6). This division, as he argues, is a result of early modern imperial contests that mapped commercial interests and subsequent concerns over racial and religious difference onto drugs themselves. If a drug could be divorced from its local use—including its preparation and cultural significance—it was more likely to be adopted into different European pharmacopoeia and subsequently legitimized as safe to consume. Of course, risk and safety are themselves historically contingent. Breen takes a wide geographical scope to unpack these concepts and their implications for drug merchants and users.
In doing so, he reframes ongoing debates concerned with the imperial politics...
