CSA Fall Lecture Series: Benjamin Siegel (Assistant Professor, History, Boston University)

For well over a century, Indian opium from Malwa & Bengal powered the pyrotechnics of the global colonial narcotics trade. Yet after the rise of international prohibition in the twentieth century, that same product found new life as the raw material for the painkillers manufactured by Western pharmaceutical companies. But opium has rarely been the boon to cultivators that it has been to the administrators, bureaucrats, & intermediaries who continue to govern it.