Description
Book SynopsisWhen most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad''s counterintuitive global history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn''t American exceptionalism at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women''s rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical American evangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory liquor machine that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations of the American west. Unlike many traditional dry histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.
Trade ReviewIn this groundbreaking, revisionist work on the history of temperance and prohibition. Schrad makes a compelling case that the temperance movement was not just an American phenomenon but "the most popular, most influential, and longest-lived international social-reform movement in the history of the world" (p. 9) ... This study will go a long way toward reorienting scholars' approach to temperance and prohibition. * J. M. Richards, CHOICE *
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Introduction-Everything You Know About Prohibition Is Wrong Part I: The Continental Empires Chapter 2: Two Tolstoys and a Lenin-Temperance and Prohibition in Russia Chapter 3: The Temperance Internationale-Social Democrats Against the Liquor Machine in Sweden and Belgium Chapter 4: Temperance, Liberalism, and Nationalism in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires Part II: The British Empire Chapter 5: Temperance and Self-Determination in the British Isles Chapter 6: Black Man's Burden, White Man's Liquor in Southern Africa Chapter 7: Gandhi, Indian Nationalism, and Temperance Resistance Against the Raj Chapter 8: The Dry Man of Europe-Ottoman Prohibition Against British Domination Part III: The United States Chapter 9: First Peoples, First Prohibitionists Chapter 10: Liquor and the Ethnic Cleansing of North America Chapter 11: "All Great Reforms Go Together"-Temperance and Abolitionism Chapter 12: The Empire Club Strikes Back Chapter 13: A Tale of Two Franceses-Temperance and Suffragism in the United States Chapter 14: The Progressive Soul of American Prohibition Chapter 15: Prohibition Against American Imperialism Chapter 16: A People's History of American Prohibition Chapter 17: Conclusion-Where Did We Go Wrong?
