Overview

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.

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9798200192007

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Sean Runnette has earned two Audie nominations and five Earphones Awards for his narrations. He has also directed and produced more than 200 audiobooks, including several Audie Award winners. He has toured with The American Repertory Theater and Mabou Mines, and his film and television credits include Two if by Sea, Copland, Sex and the City, Law & Order, and Third Watch. Benjamin Breen teaches history at University of California, Santa Cruz.

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