The age of intoxication : origins of the global drug trade / 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"-- Provided by publisher.

"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." -- Provided by publisher.

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019]

279 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

1st edition.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-262) and index.

At the statue of Adamastor -- Part I: Inventions of drugs. Searching for drugs: inventing quina in seventeenth-century Amazonia -- Selling drugs: early modern apothecaries and the limits of commodification -- Fetishizing drugs: feitiçaria, healing, and intoxication in West Central Africa -- Part II: Altered states. Occult qualities: British natural philosophers and Portuguese drugs -- Uses of intoxication in the Enlightenment -- Three ways of looking at opium -- Drug pasts and futures.