Alcohol in the Age of Industry Empire and War

This book examines alcohol production consumption regulation and commerce alongside the gendered medical religious ideological and cultural practices that surrounded alcohol from 1850 to 1950. Through analyzing major changes in alcohol's place in society contributors demonstrate the important connections between industrialization empire-building and the growth of the nation-state. They also identify the diverse actors and communities that built contested and resisted those processes around the world.<br/><br/>Overall this book proposes a new global framework that is vital to understanding how deeply alcohol was involved in central processes shaping the modern world. It shows how empires were partly built through alcohol in both economic and ideological terms yet alcohol production trade and consumption were also sites for anti-colonial resistance. Contributors also discuss how alcohol regulations and public health discourses increasingly revealed the intent and reach of state power to monitor and police citizens as well as the legitimization of that power through nationalism.<br/><br/>Illustrated with over 50 images the book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers studying the history of alcohol as well as the cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries more broadly.