Overview

For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium has remained largely untold. Markets of Pain traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource. In postcolonial India, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon. Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health.

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Benjamin Robert Siegel is an associate professor of history at Boston University. Siegel is the author of Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India. A former journalist for Time in New Delhi and Hong Kong, his writing has been published in Vice, Public Books, American Heritage, and the Christian Science Monitor. Jamie Renell originally hails from New England and is a rabid Red Sox fan. After graduating high school, he moved to Tallahassee, Florida, and attended Florida State University, where he received his BFA in acting. Upon graduating, Jamie moved to Atlanta to pursue his acting career in the burgeoning film community there. He has been involved in films, TV, and voice-over for more than ten years, and has credits that run the gamut, including Prison Break, Homeland, Jumanji, and Pitch Perfect, not to mention voicing nearly 200 audiobooks! He is the father to four wonderful, amazing children and husband to the most incredible woman in the world.

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