Age of Intoxication2019
Origins of the Global Drug Trade
by Benjamin Breen
"The book traces the drug trade's emergence on a world stage, the main points of contact and conflict that key early modern drugs initiated, and the accompanying backlashes"--
"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...