Drugs and the Industrial Situation 1800s–1960s

Scientific and technological revolutions, including the isolation of alkaloids and the invention of machines, allowed the mass production and long-distance distribution of drugs from the early nineteenth century onwards. The rise of the pharmaceutical industry affected societies in Europe and North America in terms of economic structures, styles of life and conceptualizations of public health. Yet, there has been a neglect of the ‘industrial situation’ – a term echoing Georges Balandier’s ‘colonial situation’ which he believed to be total – in other world regions. Drug factories and laboratories in Latin America, or Korea and Taiwan competed with German, Swiss, and British pharmaceutical centers, and turned into early platforms of multinational entrepreneurship with the support of states in the early twentieth century. Also, shifting consumption patterns and views on drugs that resulted from the rise of globally active pharmaceutical companies occurred not only in European and North American consumer societies, but also in the Near East, or East Asia. In sum, this workshop understands drugs as a vehicle by which to shed light on the global economic and social changes brought about by the industrial situation. Monday, August 22 09:30–09:40h Opening Elife Biçer-Deveci, ETH Zurich, Judith Vitale, UZH: Welcome remarks 09:40–12:20h Manufacturing Processes Tomás Bartoletti, ETH Zurich: Parallel Histories? Cocaïna and the Bolivian-Italian Missing Link Benjamin Breen, UC Santa Cruz: The Industrialization of Ethnobotany: Anthropologists, Chemists, and the Early Histories of Amphetamine and Mescaline, 1860–1940 Discussant: Harald Fischer-Tiné, ETH Zurich 14:10–15:40h Keynote Jim Mills, University of Strathclyde: The Asian Cocaine Crisis: Colonialism, Capitalism, and Consumption in South and East Asia, c. 1890–1945 16:10–18:50hInvisible and Licit Commodity Chains Diana Kim, Georgetown University: The “Evil Spectators”: Opium and its Colonial Stakeholders across Twentieth-Century Asia Chris Duvall: The University of New Mexico: The Mostly Invisible Transport of Psychoactive Cannabis across the Atlantic before 1925 Discussant: Miriam Kingsberg, University of Colorado Boulder Tuesday, August 23 09:30–12:10h Export Countries and their Domestic Markets Peter-Paul Bänziger, University of Basel: A History of Opiate Retailing in Industrialization Era Switzerland, c. 1780–1930 Judith Vitale, University of Zurich: Morphine Geishas: The Japanese Drug Industry in the 1920s Discussant: Oleg Benesch, University of York 13:30–16:10h Drugs in the Middle East Elife Biçer-Deveci, ETH Zurich: The Issue of Drugs in Turkey: A Nexus between Pharmaceutical Industry, the League of Nations and Nationalist Policies Haggai Ram, Ben Gurion University of the Negev: Israel and the Dialectics of the War on Drugs: Detoxicating “Outsiders Within”, Intoxicating Foreign Enemies Discussant: Liat Kozma, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 16:10–16:50h Concluding Remarks