Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War

Book excerpt: This book examines alcohol production, consumption, regulation, and commerce, alongside the gendered, medical, religious, ideological, and cultural practices that surrounded alcohol from 1850 to 1950. Through analyzing major changes in alcohol's place in society, contributors demonstrate the important connections between industrialization, empire-building, and the growth of the nation-state. They also identify the diverse actors and communities that built, contested, and resisted those processes around the world. Overall, this book proposes a new global framework that is vital to understanding how deeply alcohol was involved in central processes shaping the modern world. It shows how empires were partly built through alcohol, in both economic and ideological terms, yet alcohol production, trade, and consumption were also sites for anti-colonial resistance. Contributors also discuss how alcohol regulations and public health discourses increasingly revealed the intent and reach of state power to monitor and police citizens, as well as the legitimization of that power through nationalism. Illustrated with over 50 images, the book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers studying the history of alcohol, as well as the cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries more broadly.