Description
Book SynopsisHistorians have long neglected Afghanistan''s broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state.
In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providi
Trade Review
The book is well-written and a major contribution to an important but often forgotten aspect of Afghanistan.
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Poppies, Politics, and Power fills a notable gap in studies of Afghanistan, and does it very well. The author makes admirable use of his sources to bolster a credible and interesting line of argument. In doing so, he contributes to a growing literature which challenges older accounts of state formation in Afghanistan that understate both Afghan agency, and the powerful effects of interactions between actors in Afghanistan and players in the wider world, all with objectives of their own to realize.
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