13308

The Global Narcotics Trade: From the Opium Wars to War on Drugs

Ned Richardson-Little

Kommentar

Marking the line between licit and illicit drugs has been a defining problem of global politics over the past two centuries. This course will cover the history of efforts to restrict and criminalized the international traffic in narcotics from the beginnings of prohibition in the 19th century to the ongoing global war on drugs in the present day. In exploring the history of narcotics, the course will focus on three main commodities that were deemed illicit and increasingly criminalized over the 20th century: opiates, cocaine and cannabis. Charting how these products became global commodities through European imperialism and the first wave of globalization, the seminar will look at how certain movements, major events and historical phenomena generated new forms of global flows (via pathways such as the Hippie Trail or the French Connection) and drives towards the curtailment of illicit trade (via international treaties at the League of Nations and the United Nations). Areas of focus will include campaigns for prohibition and criminalization, moral panics surrounding narcotics, race and migration, the impact of the collapse of empires and the Cold War, and the complex intermingling of state actors and illicit narcotics producers and traffickers. Finally, the course will consider the current state of narcotics trafficking networks, prohibitions regims and the recent movement towards drug decriminalization. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

• Paul Gootenberg, “Talking about the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control,” Cultural Critique, No. 71 (2009): 13-46.
• Liat Kozma, “Cannabis Prohibition in Egypt, 1880–1939: From Local Ban to League of Nations Diplomacy,” Middle Eastern Studies, 47(3) (2011): 443–460.
• Daniel-Joseph Macarthur-Seal, “The Trans-Asian Pathways of ‘Oriental Products’: Navigating the Prohibition of Narcotics between Turkey, China, and Japan, 1918–1938,” Modern Asian Studies 56, no. 1 (2022): 207–49
• Isaac Campos, “Mexicans and the Origins of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States: A Reassessment,” The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 32 (2018): 6–37
• Philip Thai, “Hong Kong in the U.S.-UK War on Drugs, 1970–1980,” Diplomatic History 47(1): 19–54.
• Giovanni Molano Cruz, “A View from the South: The Global Creation of the War on Drugs,” Contexto Internacional 39 (2017): 633–53.
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