About this item
Highlights
- Ambivalent Pleasures explores how Europeans wrestled with the novel experience of consuming substances that could alter moods and become addictive.
- About the Author: Scott K. Taylor is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.
- 318 Pages
- History, Europe
Description
About the Book
"Tracing the moral and medical panics about addictive commodities that flourished after tobacco, chocolate, sugar, coffee, tea, and gin were introduced into Europe as a result of early modern colonial exploitation"--Book Synopsis
Ambivalent Pleasures explores how Europeans wrestled with the novel experience of consuming substances that could alter moods and become addictive. During the early modern period, psychotropic drugs like sugar, chocolate, tobacco, tea, coffee, distilled spirits like gin and rum, and opium either arrived in western Europe for the first time or were newly available as everyday commodities.
Drawing from primary sources in English, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish, Scott K. Taylor shows that these substances embodied Europeans' anxieties about race and empire, religious strife, shifting notions of class and gender roles, and the moral implications of urbanization and global trade.
Through the writings of physicians, theologians, political pamphleteers, satirists, and others, Ambivalent Pleasures tracks the emerging understanding of addiction; fears about the racial, class, and gendered implications of using these soft drugs (including that consuming them would make users more foreign); and the new forms of sociability that coalesced around their use.
Even as Europeans' moral concerns about the consumption of these drugs fluctuated, the physical and sensory experiences of using them remained a critical concern, anticipating present-day rhetoric and policy about addiction to drugs and alcohol.
About the Author
Scott K. Taylor is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain.