Review of: Cocaine: Global Histories by Paul Gootenberg more

Review: [untitled] Author(s): Brian Cowan Source: The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Aug., 2000), pp. 613-614 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Economic History Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2598885 . Accessed: 30/09/2011 14:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Blackwell Publishing and Economic History Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Economic History Review. http://www.jstor.org BOOK REVIEWS 613 The volume deserves credit as a pioneering work in Finnish environmental history. Contributions from academics with diverse backgrounds (in history, geography, ecology, and cultural studies) testify to the interdisciplinary quality of the subject-a habitual migration across the territories of the arts, sciences, and social sciences which reveals the environmental historian as a nomad by profession. However, the omission of themes such as industrial pollution, the urban environment, and issues of gender and ethnicity ultimately limits its appeal as an introductory text. The collection none the less offers rich loam for scholars of forest history, individual cases studies providing snapshots of the dialogue between humans and nature in various tree-covered landscapes. Dunlap also focuses upon the exchange between people and the natural world. In Nature and the English diaspora, he explores pioneer experiences in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US, revealing how far-flung colonists gradually found their place in strange lands. The book blazes an ambitious trail from continent to continent, exploring the interplay between British settlers and the physical environment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (although Canadianists will find that events north of the 48th parallel are given less attention). Natural history writing, settlement and agricultural schemes, national symbolism, and the development of ecological science all receive extensive coverage in Dunlap's insightful survey. The transformation of the landscape by agrarian and industrial society resounds throughout the work, but Dunlap is keen to stress 'a deeper, less visible story', that pioneers were shaped by the land itself. The behaviour of English-speaking settlers in disparate climes proved remarkably congruous. On North American and antipodean shores, colonists transformed the environment in order to create comfortably familiar and economically productive landscapes. Settlers replaced native fauna with cattle and sheep, routinely massacred 'noxious' species, and introduced exotic flora. Prompted by the rapid disappearance of wild lands in the late nineteenth century, small groups rallied to protect nature's wonders as national parks, while later generations founded powerful environmental lobbies. By highlighting the commonality of settler experience, Dunlap's work admirably modifies the myth of American exceptionalism, a theory that posits a unique relationship between Americans and their soil. Instead, the dissemination of environmental consciousness within British settler societies denotes 'a common Anglo movement' (p. 275). Dunlap's use of the comparative represents a defining quality of Nature and the English diaspora. He adeptly weaves pioneer experiences in four very different lands into an effective, entertaining, and holistic study. The reader is drawn into stunning landscapes where significant environmental controversies took place, from vigorous debates over predators in the American West to the introduction and subsequent spread of rabbits (the so-called 'grey blanket') across Australia. Dunlap's charming and vibrant environmental history clearly demonstrates the benefits of delving into what Myllyntaus labels 'nature's archives'. University of Bristol KAREN JONES Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: global histories(London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xvi + 213. 1 fig. 2 tabs. Pbk. ?14.99) Despite the prominence of illicit drugs both in contemporary popular consciousness and in the social agenda of modern states, the history of drugs remains an underdeveloped field. This collection of essays on the history of cocaine in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers a promising step in advancing our ( EconomicHistory Society 2000 614 BOOK REVIEWS understanding of the ways in which the new drug quickly became the focus of attention from international trading organizations (both legal and illicit), statecentred prohibitionary regimes, and drug consumers alike. Cocaine began to be produced in significant quantities in the 1880s, mainly by German and American pharmaceutical firms, and essays by Joseph Spillane and H. Richard Friman elucidate the transformation of cocaine from a medicinal product to an illicit drug in the American and German contexts. Most of the essays examine the various ways in which cocaine production was managed in such different contexts as Peru, the Dutch East Indies, the prewar Japanese empire, and late twentieth-century Colombia. Marek Kohn's chapter details the emergence of a putative drug underground in early twentieth-century London and the ways in which this social world was understood by the popular press and was policed by the British state. Luis Astorga's brief chapter on the emergence of illicit cocaine trafficking in twentieth-century Mexico concludes the volume. Each chapter includes a helpful guide to the primary, and especially archival, source materials used in each study. The diversity of national contexts covered in this volume justifies its subtitle 'global histories', and yet it appears that an opportunity to transcend the boundaries of merely national histories, and thus to draw conclusions about the truly global consequences of the twentieth-century cocaine phenomenon, has been missed here. Given the diversity of economic interests behind the cocaine trade and the emergence of a substantial demand for the drug among consumers around the globe, why was cocaine subject to criminalization and intense international regulation in the twentieth century? The answer to this crucial question must surely lie in the ways in which the emergence.of moral panics regarding drug consumption in European and North American societies fit in with the increasing power of their state systems to negotiate and enforce restrictions on the trade in cocaine-producing regions. It is remarkable how many of the contributions to this volume, even those ostensibly devoted to the study of cocaine in Latin America or Asia, rely on archival material generated by American institutions such as the Department of State, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The story of the criminalization of cocaine is clearly linked to the emergence of American world hegemony in the twentieth century, but this connection remains implicit, rather than an explicit object of enquiry in this book. The full history of modern cocaine remains unwritten, but these essays point future researchers in the right direction. University of Kent at Canterbury BRIAN COWAN Thomas W. Zeiler, Free trade, free world: the advent of GA TT (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 267. 19 ills. $39.95) Zeiler's handsomely produced volume promises much: it comes with glowing endorsements; the manuscript and non-American archival sources are copious; and the brief introduction suggests a critical re-examination of US trade policy from the early 1940s to the end of the Korean War, with the emphasis upon the evolution of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Zeiler has set himself a difficult task. For decades general historians have been familiar with the outlines of the political economy of US trade promotion-the actual subject of this text, despite the title's rhetorical flourish. For even longer it has been common knowledge that the United Nations system blended American ? EconomicHistory Society 2000