Overview

Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.

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9781501739767

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Reviews

Poppies, Politics, and Power reveals unknown facts about opium production. As such, this is a significant and welcome contribution to our understanding of opium production in Afghanistan, and to our understanding of why the global prohibition has failed. -- Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Centre national de le recherche scientifique, and author of <I>Opium</I> James Tharin Bradford, by analyzing an important yet neglected period in the history of Afghanistan and global drug control, has written a book of high quality and originality. -- James Windle, University College Cork, and author of <I>Suppressing Illicit Opium Production</I>

The book is well-written and a major contribution to an important but often forgotten aspect of Afghanistan. * Choice * Poppies, Politics, and Power fills a notable gap in studies of Afghanistan, and does it very well. The author makes admirable use of his sources to bolster a credible and interesting line of argument. In doing so, he contributes to a growing literature which challenges older accounts of state formation in Afghanistan that understate both Afghan agency, and the powerful effects of interactions between actors in Afghanistan and players in the wider world, all with objectives of their own to realize. * PACIFIC AFFAIRS *

Author Information

James Tharin Bradford is Assistant Professor of History at Berklee College of Music, and Adjunct Lecturer at Babson College. He has published in the Journal of Iranian Studies, Oxford University Handbook of Drug History, and Illegal Cannabis Cultivation in the World.

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