Covering a wide range of substances, this new edition has been extensively updated, with an updated bibliography and two new chapters on cannabis and khat. Consuming Habits is the perfect companion for all those interested in how different cultures have defined drugs across the ages.

Psychoactive substances have been central to the formation of civilizations and the growth of the world economy. This collection of original essays explores the rich analytical category of psychoactive substances from challenging historical and anthropological perspectives.

Covering a wide range of substances, including opium, cocaine, coffee, tobacco, kola, and betelnut, from prehistory to the present day, this new edition has been extensively updated, with an updated bibliography and two new chapters on cannabis and khat. Consuming Habits is the perfect companion for all those interested in how different cultures have defined drugs across the ages. Psychoactive substances have been central to the formation of civilizations, the definition of cultural identities, and the growth of the world economy. The labelling of these substances as 'legal' or 'illegal' has diverted attention away from understanding their important cultural and historical role. This collection explores the rich analytical category of psychoactive substances from challenging historical and anthropological perspectives.

This pioneering collection of original essays explores the rich analytical category of psycho- active substances from challenging historical and anthropological perspectives. Psychoactive substances have been central to the formation of civilizations and the growth of the world economy. Consuming Habits describes how and why: tea and coffee replaced beer on the breakfast tables of 18th century Europe in Islamic emirates at the turn of the century kola nuts formed part of tax payments, and were given as gifts by so-called `big men' In 1902 opera singers had their doctors prescribe them cocaine to aid singing the original version of `coca-cola' was described as a `brain tonic.' This pioneering collection of original essays explores the rich analytical category of psychoactive substances from challenging historical and anthropological perspectives.

Drug trafficking and consumption are among the most pressing global issues of our time and the approaches to alleviating them are myriad and complex. With Drugs and the World,Axel Klein takes a remarkably broad approach to the issue, exploring the importance of psychoactive substances to our health and culture. To be properly understood, drugs should not be simply examined from a negative point of view, Klein argues. From their centrality in religious rituals to their part in the growth of trade among nation-states, Klein reveals the pivotal role that drugs have played in the advancement of human society. Klein then investigates the modern policies that define certain substances as drugs; the link between drugs, addiction, and crime; and the legal strategies and policies around the world that have largely failed to control global drug trafficking. The book also draws upon studies from the Caribbean, West Africa and Eastern Europe to propose solutions that could reinforce the eroded power of state institutions, law enforcement, and the democratic process in addressing drug trafficking. A timely and in-depth analysis, Drugs and the World offers an expertly written examination that will be essential for all those concerned with the role of drugs in the modern world.

Nigerian drug lords in UK prisons, khat-chewing Somali pirates hijacking Western ships, crystal meth-smoking gangs controlling South Africa's streets, and narco-traffickers corrupting the state in Guinea-Bissau: these are some of the vivid images surrounding drugs in Africa which have alarmed policymakers, academics and the general public in recent years. In this revealing and original book, the authors weave these aspects into a provocative argument about Africa's role in the global trade and control of drugs. In doing so, they show how foreign-inspired policies have failed to help African drug users but have strengthened the role of corrupt and brutal law enforcement officers, who are tasked with halting the export of heroin and cocaine to European and American consumer markets. A vital book on an overlooked front of the so-called war on drugs.

The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for “capitalists.” The word “socialists” was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments. Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically from those of the socialists that followed. Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover the Academy’s ideas and the policies they informed. At the core of their preoccupations lay the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare in an era when the three were becoming increasingly intertwined. What distinguished these thinkers was their articulation of a secular basis for social organization, rooted in commerce, and their insistence that political economy trumped theology as the underpinning for peace and prosperity within and among nations. Reinert argues that the Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and the project of creating market societies. By reconstructing ideas in their historical contexts, he addresses motivations and contingencies at the very foundations of modernity.