The Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History

Abstract

Drugs and their illicit use have long fascinated writers and the reading public. Informed by new interdisciplinary perspectives, a growing number of academically trained historians are now approaching drugs as a fresh topic for serious research. This OUP Handbook of Global Drug History is the first major attempt by historians of drugs to take stock of the recent progress and directions of this academic field, utilizing both a global scope and long-term lens. The thirty-five original contributions here simultaneously survey what is known historically about drugs across the world (in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa) and illustrate their increasingly global interconnections. The ever-changing human relationship with drugs, while going back millennia, became consolidated across the early modern world. These longer drug histories converged globally with the nineteenth-century rise of modern pariah drugs; with the dramatic twentieth-century shift to illicit drugs and global prohibitions; and emerging twenty-first century possibilities for rethinking the social, health, and policy approaches to global drug trafficking and use.