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

所有迹象都表明，在16世纪后期和17世纪，醉酒的生产、运输和消费有了显著的增长。醉酒是一种物质，在当时被认为是“中毒、毒化”和“推搡或醉酒”，今天则被认为往往对人体的生理和心理过程产生有害影响，特别是如果过量摄入的话。这包括麦酒、啤酒、葡萄酒和烈性酒等“旧世界”酒精，以及烟草和鸦片等“殖民食品”。利用一系列档案材料，这个项目将做三件事。它将尽可能以经验和系统的方式追踪约1580年至1740年之间醉酒药物的增加情况。它将寻求解释这一增长的原因，一方面特别关注地方、国家和国际市场的作用，另一方面也特别关注“公民社会”的形成。它将探索这些发展的一些关键推论：特别是早期现代国家的形成以及印刷媒体和话语的发展。主要目标有两个：检验一种假说，即麻醉剂是被社会和经济史学家称为“早期现代性”的一系列过程、过渡和冲突中不可或缺的一部分，以及我们的现代醉酒文化和经济的显著特征是在早期现代出现的；以及展示早期现代麻醉剂历史如何建设性地阐明和提高我们对当前问题、问题和实践的理解。这样的调查是及时的。醉酒是当代的一种痴迷。现在，他们比以往任何时候都更深刻地牵涉到现代生活的大多数方面：这对政府、媒体和各种医学‘专家’都是如此，对生产者、贩运者和日常使用者(无论是非法的还是合法的)都是如此。理解这种痴迷的复杂而多维的历史只会丰富当前的辩论和政策。同样，人们对这一主题的历史学兴趣也在迅速增长。长期以来，经济和社会历史学家一直对特定种类的醉人及其社会经济影响感兴趣。更新的分析发展--在历史人类学、物质文化、消费史、性别史方面--只会加剧和丰富这种兴趣。然而，在我们的商业知识以及概念化和解释问题上仍然存在着巨大的差距。由于历史学家将醉酒视为单独的商品，而不是具有共同醉人特征的可食性物品，它们的历史意义被忽略了。这也助长了一种误导性的时间顺序中断。1650年前的旧世界酒精饮料不仅比1650年后的殖民食品少得多；它们被视为完全不同的现象。其结果是，关于商品、市场、社交、消费、治安和话语的关键连续性被模糊了。关于社会变化的正统描述将醉酒的消费，特别是酒精的消费描述为“前现代”甚至“反现代”，从而使问题变得更加复杂。然而，我们所拥有的经验证据表明情况恰恰相反：醉酒(包括酒精)是早期现代体验的标准特征。因此，探索这一悖论使我们最珍视的一些社会学陈词滥调成了问题。为此，该项目考虑了醉酒的相互关联的经济和文化。它将1580年至1740年--从欧洲烟草的引入到杜松子酒热潮的开始--视为对现代态度和行为具有巨大意义的一个时代。它不是让历史社会学的正统观点预先确定其研究结果，而是在新的实证研究的基础上，寻求挑战并在必要时取代这些正统观点。

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.