Drugs and Global Capitalism

Catalog description

Drugs have been crucial objects in the development of the modern world. Drug profits drove European empires and transnational capitalism, even as “drug wars” built and expanded an unequal infrastructure for global governance. This course examines major episodes in global drug history, including (but not limited to) opium and the British empire; cigarettes and the origins of multinational corporations; cocaine and global drug control; and pharmaceuticals and the global biopolitics of health. We will see how drugs have served as instruments of control, but also vehicles for resistance, in the contested development of global capitalism.