Teaching the History of Drugs as Commodities: A Talk with Historian Paul Gootenberg

Abstract

Paul Gootenberg is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at Stony Brook University (New York) and Chair of History. He is a global commodity and drug historian trained as a Latin Americanist at the University of Chicago and Oxford.  His works include Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (UNC Press, 2008), Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge, 1999) and with Liliana M. Dávalos, The Origins of Cocaine: Peasant Colonization and Failed Development in the Amazon Andes (Routledge, 2018).  From 2011-14 he chaired the Drugs, Security and Democracy fellowship (DSD) of the Soros Open Society Foundation and Social Science Research Council. Gootenberg is General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Drug History and President-elect 2021of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS).  He regularly teaches courses at Stony Brook about the history of commodities and drugs. What follows is an edited transcript of an interview he had with Elisabet Rasch one of the editors of the Teaching Commodity Frontiers section, in February 2021.