Global historiography has long focused firmly on colonialism, but often fails to look to the modes and methods of imperialism that bolster the enterprise beyond the obvious workings of both hard and economic power. Miriam Kingsberg's groundbreaking work, Moral Nation, successfully enhances the discussion of how both thought patterns and the narcotics trade reified nexuses of imperialism from and including Japan.
The economic, ideological, and political roles of the drug trade in Japan's growing empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are worthy of study, yet the field has proven woefully underdeveloped. Kingsberg's monograph, the welcome entry of which doubles the number of scholarly texts from the Japanese perspective, begins with the framing of Japan's imperial enterprise and the debate over drug use in the modern era, both of which overlapped with the acquisition of Taiwan following Japan's victory over the Qing in 1895. What Kingsberg effectively...
