The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade

Written by:
Benjamin Breen
Narrated by:
Sean Runnette

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
Narrator
Release Date
October 2020
Duration
8 hours 12 minutes
Summary
Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term 'drug' encompassed everything from herbs and spices-like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile-to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories-illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional-and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist.

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 from the very beginning.
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