Intoxicants and Early Modernity: England c.1580-c.1740

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There is every indication that the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a significant increase in the production, traffic, and consumption of intoxicants: substances understood at the time to be 'poisoning, or envenoming' and 'tuddling or making drunk', and which today are recognized as having an often detrimental impact on the body's physiological and mental processes, especially if consumed in excess. This includes 'old world' alcohols like ale, beer, wine, and spirits; and 'colonial groceries' like tobacco and opium. Utilising a range of archival materials, this project will do three things. It will trace the increase in intoxicants between c. 1580 and c. 1740 as empirically and systematically as possible. It will look to explain the increase, paying particular attention to the role of local, national, and international markets on the one hand and the formation of 'civil society' on the other. And it will explore some of the key corollaries of these developments: in particular the formation of the early-modern state and developments in printed media and discourses. The key objectives are twofold: to examine the hypothesis that intoxicants were integral to the set of processes, transitions, and conflicts known by social and economic historians as 'early modernity', and that it was in the early modern era that the salient features of our modern culture and economy of intoxication emerged; and to show how the early modern history of intoxicants constructively illuminates and enhances our understanding of present issues, problems, and practices.Such an investigation is timely. Intoxicants are a contemporary obsession. Now more than ever they are deeply implicated in most aspects of modern life: this is as true for government, the press, and various kind of medical 'expert' as it is for producers, traffickers, and everyday users (both illicit and licit). Understanding the complicated and multidimensional history of this obsession can only enrich current debates and policies. Likewise there is burgeoning historiographical interest in the subject. Economic and social historians have long been interested in particular kinds of intoxicant and their socio-economic ramifications. More recent analytical developments - in historical anthropology, material culture, the history of consumption, gender history - have only served to accentuate and enrich this interest. There nevertheless remain huge gaps in our empricial knowledge as well as problems of conceptualization and interpretation. Because historians have treated intoxicants as individual commodities rather than as comestibles with shared intoxicating characteristics, their historical significance is elided. This also encourages a misleading chronological discontinuity. Old world alcoholic beverages before 1650 are not only much less studied than colonial groceries after 1650; they are treated as entirely different phenomena. As a result, crucial continuities regarding commodities, markets, sociability, consumption, policing, and discourse are obscured. Orthodox accounts of social change compound the problem by styling the consumption of intoxicants, in particular alcohol, as 'pre-modern' or even 'anti-modern'. Yet what empirical evidence we have suggests the opposite: that intoxicants (including alcohol) were normative features of early modern experience.Exploring this paradox therefore problematizes some of our most cherished sociological shibboleths. To this end the project considers the inter-connected economy and culture of intoxicants. It treats the period 1580-1740 - between the European introduction of tobacco and the onset of the 'gin craze' - as a single era of huge significance for modern attitudes and practices. And rather than have its findings pre-determined by historical-sociological orthodoxies, it looks to challenge and where necessary replace those orthodoxies on the basis of new empirical research.