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.
Featuring numerous illuminating anecdotes and a cast of characters that
includes merchants, slaves, shamans, prophets, inquisitors, and
alchemists, The Age of Intoxication rethinks a history of drugs and
the early drug trade that has too often been framed as
opposites--between medicinal and recreational, legal and illegal, good
and evil. Breen argues that, in order to guide drug policy toward a
fairer and more informed course, we first need to understand who and
what set the global drug trade in motion.
