The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade by Benjamin Breen (review)

As Cristóbal de Acuña journeyed down one of the Amazon's tributaries in 1639, he noted that the forest contained both "the greatest apothecary of medicinal drugs [botica de simples] which has yet been discovered" and untold "poisonous herbs [yervas venenosas] with which to take vengeance against enemies" (29).¹ This example embodies the blurry and culturally mediated line between substances deemed healing and those deemed harmful that has shaped the history of their conceptualization and regulation. Recognition of this tension motivates Benjamin Breen's core argument in The Age of Intoxication that the current categorization of some drugs as recreational and others as narcotic stems from fears of cultural difference that emerged from a globalizing world during what he describes with no little irony as "the so-called Age of Reason" (128).

What was a drug, though? Drugs were not conceptualized in the early modern world as they are now. Tax collectors, merchants, medical practitioners, tradespeople, and patients understood them as multifunctional substances whose physical properties and cultural associations allowed them to assume different uses—as food, catalyst, chemical, narcotic, or medicine, for example—as well as different values and meanings. Drugs were also big business, and as objects of global commerce they offered the prospect of health and wealth for some, while underwriting the gendered and racialized regimes at the core of commercial empires—a history that has been obscured by their association with healing.²

As scholars have begun to do in recent years, Breen charts a middle course between the cultural, medical, and economic aspects of the history of drugs to denaturalize the ascendency of some drugs and the stigmatization of others.³ He focuses on drugs as "things consumed to alter the mind or body" (4), enabling him to include lesser-known or "failed" commodities such as peyote and ayahuasca alongside global commodities such as opium. That none of these drugs were exclusively or even predominately viewed as medicinal—despite their potential curative powers—demonstrates the necessity of such an approach. Analyzing psychoactive and medicinal substances together enables this elegantly and evocatively written book to challenge historical assumptions about drugs and more recent legal divisions between illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal.

As the book's subtitle makes clear, this is a global story told through local ones spanning the Anglophone and Lusophone worlds, dancing across Goa, Angola, Brazil, Lisbon, London, and spaces in between. It is also an essentially human one, and along the way readers encounter altered mental states, new physical sensations, and a range of characters. In Breen's telling, "the desire to alter mental and physical states by ingesting natural products appears to number among the defining traits of our species" (5). The Age of Intoxication thus seems as concerned with the early modern world as it is with the formation of the modern one in which drugs are divided into licit pharmaceuticals and illicit narcotics based largely on, Breen suggests, a fear of cultural difference rooted in premodern anxieties concerning commercial competition, bodily harm, and non-European spirituality.⁴

Breen's approach allows The Age of Intoxication to make significant contributions to several historiographies, notably the histories of science and empire, as well as cultural histories of difference making more broadly. His book fits into the colonial botany paradigm exemplified by the work of Londa Schiebinger, Claudia Swan, Daniela Bleichmar, and Paula De Vos, it bolsters the historiography on cross-cultural exchange.⁵ He substantively explores physiological properties alongside the cultural construction of meaning, which have often been separate approaches within the history of medicine.⁶ As he argues, physiological responses to a drug such as opium cannot be explained away with cultural constructivism; rather scholars must account for the fact that "the ways that those biological realities are felt has varied wildly over time and place" (177, emphasis in original).

The book's first part directs...