Description
Ambivalent Pleasures explores how Europeans wrestled with the novel experience of consuming substances that could alter moods and become addictive. During the early modern period, psychotropic drugs like sugar, chocolate, tobacco, tea, coffee, distilled spirits like gin and rum, and opium either arrived in western Europe for the first time or were newly available as everyday commodities.
Drawing from primary sources in English, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish, Scott K. Taylor shows that these substances embodied Europeans'' anxieties about race and empire, religious strife, shifting notions of class and gender roles, and the moral implications of urbanization and global trade.
Through the writings of physicians, theologians, political pamphleteers, satirists, and others, Ambivalent Pleasures tracks the emerging understanding of addiction; fears about the racial, class, and gendered implications of using these soft drugs (including that co
