Description
Book SynopsisIn 1920 the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs culminated eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking. Steffen Rimner shows how local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to harness naming and shaming in international politics—a deterrent that continues today.
Trade Review[A] landmark study of narcotics and civil society…Rimner tells us a great deal about the poppy trade, but this book’s more lasting provocation is the one it offers about citizen action and moral authority in the global order…This book fluently interweaves literature which has rarely before been treated in concert, and is a rich treat for scholars of late empire and international institutions…Offers much food for thought about narcotics and empire. -- Benjamin Siegel * New Rambler *
In its global scope and integrative narrative,
Opium’s Long Shadow offers a long overdue corrective to studies of opium’s history…The book is more valuable for how the Chinese story gains global dimensions, both through the story the book tells and the details it mobilizes…A fine example of what a locally-attuned global history can look like. -- Stacie Kent * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *
Thoroughly researched and absorbing,
Opium’s Long Shadow provides a crucial new insight into the complex local, regional, and international calculus that produced global drug control during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. -- David A. Guba, Jr. * Pharmacy in History *
In a work of great brilliance and erudition, Steffen Rimner shows himself to be a complete historian: polyglot and a master of a vast range of sources, a teller of stories and an acute analyst of power and culture. Never has global opium received a more nuanced treatment. -- Jürgen Osterhammel, author of
The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth CenturyAs this fascinating and deeply researched study reveals, the struggle against opium was driven by a broad coalition of actors hailing from Europe, the United States, and Asia. In a truly transnational history of the fight against opium, Rimner shows the ultimate effectiveness of the international coalition despite many actors’ pursuit of stubbornly local agendas. -- Sebastian Conrad, author of
What Is Global History?There has as yet been no study that uses opium as a means of exploring the complex questions of identity, sovereignty, and boundaries in Asia in a time of globalization. The distinctive and sophisticated argument of
Opium’s Long Shadow gives us a new approach to understanding the formation of international society. -- Rana Mitter, author of
Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945This wonderful book provides us with an excellent overview of local protests against opium trafficking across national boundaries as well as revealing much about the dynamics of drug-trading governments whom they shamed. Rimner effectively integrates the Japanese past, as well as that of other Asian states, into the context of global history. -- Haneda Masashi, author of
Toward Creation of a New World History
