Diana S. Kim's evocatively titled first book, Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia, begins with an intriguing paradox. How did opium shift from being a vaunted source of imperial state revenue to being a reviled source of imperial vice and immorality at the turn of the twentieth century? How should one understand the transformation of imperial logics, and the variegated authoritative claims that undergirded them, that impelled such dramatic changes in colonial opium regulation across Southeast Asia? These compelling questions lead Kim to make key interventions in the study of imperial governance, bureaucracy, and policy making across multiple disciplines, from history and political science to sociology and area studies.
Rather than examining policies radiating out from European metropoles, Empires of Vice investigates the processual nature of policy making grounded in the nitty-gritty paperwork of local imperial administrators stationed within the colonies. As Kim lucidly...
