In the 1960s, the governments of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia launched agricultural settlement programs in each country's vast Amazonian frontier lowlands. Two decades later, these exact same zones had transformed into the centers of the illicit cocaine boom of the Americas. Drawing on concepts from both history and anthropology, The Origins of Cocaine explores how three countries with divergent different mid-century political trajectories ended up with parallel outcomes in illicit frontier economies and cocalero cultures. Bringing together transnational, national, and local analyses, the volume provides an in-depth examination of the deep origins of drug economics in the Americas. As the first substantial study on the shift from agrarian colonization to narcotization, The Origins of Cocaine will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of Latin American history, anthropology, globalization, development and environmental studies.

This volume examines the rise and fall of cocaine. In the 19th century it was openly legal and legitimately used by scientists, medics and pharmaceutical manufacturers alike. This contrasts starkly with the international prohibitionist regimes and drug gangs linked to cocaine today. Themes explored include: Amsterdam's complex cocaine culture; the manufacture, sale and control of cocaine in the United States; Japan and the Southeast Asian cociane industry; export of cocaine prohibitions to Peru; and sex, drugs and race in early modern London. The book unveils primary sources and covert social, cultural and political transformations to shed light on cocaine's hidden history.

Orginally a medical miracle, cocaine is now a dangerous pariah drug. Cocaine: Global Histories examines the rise and fall of this notorious substance. In the nineteenth century it was openly legal and legitimately used by scientists, doctors and pharmaceutical giants alike. This contrasts starkly with the international prohibitionist regimes and underground circuits linked to cocaine today.
Drawing on exciting new global perspectives, Cocaine analyses and rethinks the origins of the modern drug cocaine. For the first time, a book brings together the world's leading writers on the history of cocaine. Themes explored include:
· the early manufacture, sale and control of cocaine in the United States;
· Amsterdam's complex cocaine network;
· Japan and the unknown Southeast Asian cocaine industry;
· export of cocaine prohibitions to Peru;
· sex, drugs and race in London.
Cocaine unveils new sources and covert social, cultural and political transformations that shed light on cocaine's hidden history. This volume is essential reading for anyone concerned with the place of drugs in the modern world.

In the 1960s, the governments of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia launched agricultural settlement programs in each country's vast Amazonian frontier lowlands. Two decades later, these exact same zones had transformed into the centers of the illicit cocaine boom of the Americas. Drawing on concepts from both history and anthropology, The Origins of Cocaine explores how three countries with divergent different mid-century political trajectories ended up with parallel outcomes in illicit frontier economies and cocalero cultures. Bringing together transnational, national, and local analyses, the volume provides an in-depth examination of the deep origins of drug economics in the Americas. As the first substantial study on the shift from agrarian colonization to narcotization, The Origins of Cocaine will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of Latin American history, anthropology, globalization, development and environmental studies.

Drugs and their illicit use have long fascinated writers and the public at large. Informed by new interdisciplinary perspectives, a growing number of academically trained historians are now approaching drugs as a wide-open topic for serious research. This Handbook of Global Drug History is the first major attempt by historians of drugs to take stock of the recent progress and directions of this field, utilizing both a global scope and long-term historical perspective. Thirty-five original essays simultaneously survey what is known historically about drugs across the world (in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa) as well as illustrating their historical interconnections. The use of drugs in human culture goes back millennia with as many unique histories as cultures in which drugs were used. In the early modern world, human relationships with drugs changed, and drugs connected societies through transnational trade. In the nineteenth century, these diverse histories converge in defining the modern "pariah drugs" (among them alcohol, opium, and indigenous hallucinogens) and paved the way for the dramatic twentieth-century rise of both illicit drugs (such as cannabis, heroin, and cocaine) and global prohibitions. Now, in the twenty-first century, we see emerging possibilities for rethinking the global social, health, and policy approaches to drug trafficking and use.

Since the earliest years of European colonialism, Latin America has been a region of seemingly intractable inequalities, marked by a stark divide between the haves and the have-nots. This collection illuminates the diverse processes that have combined to produce and reproduce inequalities in Latin America, as well as some of the implications of those processes for North Americans. Anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, and political scientists from North and South America offer new and varied perspectives, building on the sociologist Charles Tilly's relational framework for understanding enduring inequalities. While one essay is a broad yet nuanced analysis of Latin American inequality and its persistence, another is a fine-grained ethnographic view of everyday life and aspirations among shantytown residents living on the outskirts of Lima. Other essays address topics such as the initial bifurcation of Peru's healthcare system into one for urban workers and another for the rural poor, the asymmetrical distribution of political information in Brazil, and an evolving Cuban "aesthetics of inequality," which incorporates hip-hop and other transnational cultural currents. Exploring the dilemmas of Latin American inequalities as they are playing out in the United States, a contributor looks at new immigrant Mexican farmworkers in upstate New York to show how undocumented workers become a vulnerable rural underclass. Taken together, the essays extend social inequality critiques in important new directions.

Contributors
Jeanine Anderson
Javier Auyero
Odette Casamayor
Christina Ewig
Paul Gootenberg
Margaret Gray
Eric Hershberg
Lucio Renno
Luis Reygadas

This is a new view of cocaine's expansive history.Illuminating a hidden and fascinating chapter in the history of globalization, Paul Gootenberg chronicles the rise of one of the most spectacular and now illegal Latin American exports: cocaine.Gootenberg traces cocaine's history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug's transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story to uncover the roles played by hitherto obscure but vital Andean actors as well - for example, the Peruvian pharmacist who developed the techniques for refining cocaine on an industrial scale and the creators of the original drug-smuggling networks that decades later would be taken over by Colombian traffickers.Andean Cocaine proves indispensable to understanding one of the most vexing social dilemmas of the late twentieth-century Americas: the American cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and, in its wake, the seemingly endless U. S. drug war in the Andes.