Drugs, Labor and Colonial Expansion (review)

This collection of essays deals with the role of drugs, primarily alcohol, but also tobacco, ganja, coca and caffeine in contact and colonial situations. As with all collections of essays the book is somewhat diffuse, but the editors have selected two principles to organize the collection around, the first being the propensity of drug foods to create incommensurate exchange in areas outside of direct European control and the second being the use of drugs to increase the intensity or duration of labor in areas of more direct control. Borrowing from Appadurai they claim that “Drugs...by their nature, create and maintain exchanges or contexts where ‘value and price have become......completely unyoked.’” Drugs thus create a situation of colonial exploitation in areas where full colonial government has not yet reached. This is the theme of Maggie Brady and Jeremy Long’s study of Aboriginal Australians and tobacco, Charles Ambler’s essay on alcohol and the West African slave trade and Peter Mancall’s study of the role of alcohol in the North American fur trade. The editors’ suggestion that value and price become completely unyoked seems somewhat exaggerated, and indeed they suggest that in many cases indigenous traditions of substance use conditioned the reception of new drugs. This is demonstrated in Terence Hays’s study of tobacco in colonial Papua New Guinea. Hays suggests that in areas where indigenous tobaccos had existed for centuries rituals and rules arose to constrain their use and that these were transferred to imported tobaccos. It was only in areas without indigenous tobaccos and thus without social contexts for their use that ‘widespread addiction’ and the other signs of incommensurate exchange appear. Hays points out that this is typical of the histories of drug foods in many societies, and one of the valuable aspects of this collection of essays is that they draw on the now considerable literature on drug foods and apply it to colonial situations.

Despite the editors’ suggestion that drugs cause value and price to become completely unyoked, i.e. that the chemical properties of these drugs completely overwhelm their social context, in fact these drugs almost always remain inside a social context. This context can change, as Robert Gordon’s study of the role of beer in creating settler identity and then national identity in Namibia shows, but it might be more accurate to say that drugs are often used in new and for some unsettling social contexts rather than that they escape the bounds of social science entirely. Indeed, it is the ability of these drugs to quickly create social connections among consumers and between buyers and sellers that makes them so attractive in contact situations.

The other role that the editors stress is the use of drug foods to encourage and reward labor, a mechanism that is most important in areas of direct control. This is the theme of Michael Angrosino’s study of rum and ganja in the Trinidad sugar industry, David A. Suggs and Stacy A. Lewis’s essay on alcohol in BaTswana, and Vicki Cassman, Cartmell and Eliana Belmonte’s study of coca in the Andes, E.N. Anderson’s study of caffeine. In all of these cases the drug is desired by the users as a way of making labor easier to endure and by those who control labor as a way of encouraging production and a tractable labor force.

In his study of rum and ganja Angrosino examines the gradual shift from ganja to rum among workers in the Trinidad sugar industry. The South Asian labor force initially preferred ganja because of its cultural familiarity, supposed ability to encourage labor and the financial rewards of ganja production and sale. The change was encouraged by estate owners who assumed correctly that rum purchases would tie workers to the estate economy and incorrectly that rum would produce a more tractable labor force than ganja. Elimination of ganja was also popular with missionaries, precisely because it tied Indian laborers to their uncivilized culture. This case reflects the complex web of...