This article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective. Early modern intoxicants were not disaggregated, free-floating commodities. Their consumption and trade took place within a larger constellation of social codes, cultural practices, ecologies, and built environments. Psychedelic compounds such as peyote and ayahuasca serve here as case studies for examining how the globalization of drugs involved far more than the transport of the substances themselves. Despite their centrality to numerous societies throughout the pre-Columbian Americas, the larger ‘assemblage’ of material cultures, cultural assumptions, and religious meanings that accrued around these substances made it difficult for them to follow the same paths as commodified drugs like cacao or tobacco.

From its origins in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean to its transformation into smoke in a Jacobean chamber, tobacco entered drastically new contexts of use as it travelled from Indigenous America to the social spaces of early seventeenth-century London. This article draws on comparative anthropology and archaeology to explore how early colonization, particularly in Jamestown, influenced the development of smoking among the English political elite. This offers a case study into the ways in which Indigenous commodities and knowledge were integrated into English ritual practices of their own; it also reveals the deliberate choices made by the English to set themselves apart from those they sought to colonize. Placing the material practices and wit poetry of gentlemen within the geopolitics of colonialism raises attention to the acts of erasure or dispossession that accompanied the incorporation of tobacco into urban sociability. Here, the practices of Indigenous peoples were modified and altered, and the pleasures of plantation were expressed as an intoxication as potent as the plant itself.

The effects and dangers of opium were subject to intense scientific scrutiny and experimentation in Paris in the decades around 1700, as rival networks of healers contended for commercial advantage over the compound drugs that contained it. Opium, widely consumed in the Ottoman empire, became a subject of European scientific interest in an attempt to render it safe, agreeable, and beneficial for European bodies. Apothecaries sought to resurrect an ancient drug and infuse it with new life in the laboratory; physicians conducted chemical experiments upon it. Yet it was hard to reach agreement as to opium's harmful or beneficial effects; some aspects of its nature proved impossible to ‘domesticate’ in the same way as other exotic drugs like coffee or tea, or even cinchona. I argue that only by investigating the discrete networks which sold and experimented upon opium can the historian account for the ways in which this drug generated social, political, and financial capital for experimenters as it circulated throughout society.

Taking the humoral body as its spatial focus, this article considers how medical writers and practitioners engaged with ‘intoxicants’ both in terms of the prescription of medicines and in the conceptualization of compulsive consumption – or what is often styled by modern practitioners as ‘addiction’. Focusing in the first instance on the compilers of vernacular pharmacopoeia – compilations of medical ingredients and techniques – the article argues that just as sugar, tobacco, and especially opiates had a significant and possibly transformative role in everyday physic, so the ‘operation’ of opiates, distilled spirits, and tobacco was crucial in stimulating new thinking about how bodies became substance-dependent. The article also argues, however, that, in order to conceptualize the problem, writers turned to the venerable language of custom rather than the relatively new language of addiction – in particular, the ancient idea of custom as ‘second nature’.

This article examines the emergent use of alcohol as a preservation medium for scientific specimens from the mid-seventeenth century in Britain. Taking the work of the London apothecary James Petiver (1660–1718) as its focus, the article explores the ways in which alcohol was used to fix and remediate the specimen, shown ‘lifelike’ in glass, in displays or in engravings. Petiver actively promoted the use of pickling spirits, publishing instructions on how to preserve specimens and distributing these to his collecting agents in the Indies trade. The article introduces the early history of preservation in alcohol in England, and particularly the work of Robert Boyle in promoting the wet collection. It then follows Petiver's agent, Richard Bradley, on his 1711 visit to Leiden and Amsterdam, examining the role of alcohol alongside other means of preserving and activating the scientific collection.

This article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on the role of snuff- and tobacco boxes, which uniquely provided white middling-sorts on both sides of the Atlantic with a socialized canvas upon which significant statements of status, personality, and sensibility could be made. However, a closer study of these objects during America's revolutionary period reveals stark contrasts in the social, political, and gendered meanings ascribed to tobacco-taking between Britain and America. The material evidence, it is argued, suggests that for men, and especially for women in revolutionary America, snuff- and tobacco-taking became almost synonymous with loyalty to the republic.

Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).

This article focuses on a copper still transported from London to the Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica and used to convert waste sugar products into rum, one of the many New World intoxicants which transformed British consumption patterns in the early modern period. Much has been written about the consumer revolution which allowed these commodities to be absorbed into everyday lives but less interest has been shown in the producer revolution needed to get the goods to market. The labour, skills, and materials embodied in the production and use of the copper still highlight how slave production of rum was integrated into a steadily advancing industrial capitalism linking dispersed sites and workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rum production was a collaborative effort in which Caribbean plantations were inextricably chained to the local, regional, and international economies, and it involved adaptations in skills, tools, and techniques which were incorporated into Britain's long, slow industrial revolution.

This article explores the relationship between a distinctive early modern city, Boston, Massachusetts, and the dramatic expansion of the production and consumption of intoxicants in the emergent Atlantic world. In particular, it attempts to draw together two strands of Boston's history seldom considered together: its origins as an aspirational settlement of English puritans aiming to build a godly city, and the deep involvement of its merchants and consumers in the overseas trade in intoxicants – tobacco, sugar, rum, wine, coffee, tea, chocolate, and others. By considering the cultures of consumption associated with godliness alongside other clusters of consumption in which intoxicants also played a part, it attempts to open new avenues for thinking about the many ways in which new forms and objects of desire transformed the economy and material culture of early modernity.

This article explores the various roles that alcohol played in defining the governance of East India Company fortifications and settlements in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that, much like elsewhere in Europe, Asia, and the colonial world, alcohol was absolutely crucial to political and social life, as well as a source of great revenue and profit for both the Company and individuals who worked for it. At the same time, it was a cause of immense anxiety and concern for Company government, which understood the use (and overuse) of alcohol as a principal sign of potential disorder and disobedience. Far from a contradiction, this ambivalence towards alcohol formed a foundation for a variety of regulatory instruments, from tavern licences to taxation, that were crucial to the establishment of early Company governance and a prime reflection of the Company's very own ambivalent nature as both merchant and sovereign.

White Jamaicans developed a drinking culture that drew on British precedents, but which mutated in the tropics into a form of sociability different from how sociability operated in mid-eighteenth Enlightenment Europe, where civility was a much-aspired-to norm. In this article, I use works by eighteenth-century social commentators on Jamaica – Edward Long and especially J. B. Moreton – to explore how white Jamaicans developed a form of sociability which in Long was praised as showing Jamaicans as a generous and hospitable people but which in Moreton was described, more accurately, as a distinctive and unattractive form of debauchery, oriented around excessive drinking and sexual exploitation of enslaved women and free women of colour. The overwhelming importance of slavery in Jamaica accentuated the trends towards a debauched version of hospitality that stressed white male pleasure over everything else as a central animating value in society.