Chasing Addicts: Phantoms in the Archives, Figures on the Street (keynote speaker).

Description

This paper starts by exploring the cocaine addicts of colonial India in the period between c. 1900 and c.1947.  Local newspapers in Calcutta began reporting community unease about the non-medical consumption of cocaine there at the turn of the century and the colonial authorities acted with unexpected alacrity.  By the end of the year the first regulations seeking to limit consumption to strictly medical purposes were in place, and by 1906 these had been extended across all British territories in South Asia.  Despite this, and often vigorous efforts to enforce these controls, South Asians continued to consume cocaine illicitly until the market there disappeared in the chaos of world war and the partition of India.  The encounters between the colonial authorities and the Indian cocaine addicts that occupied them for almost half a century will be traced here.  In doing this, however, the paper will attempt to move beyond this specific story to consider what it is that historians of intoxicating substances are up to.  There has been a lurch towards the histories of consumers of these substances over the last decade or so, and this paper ruminates upon that direction.  The questions to be addressed are what has this turn achieved, and should we continue to follow it in our research?  My answers lie in the last seven years of chasing those Indian cocaine addicts through the archives; but, perhaps surprisingly, they can also be found in the contemporary committee rooms of the modern Scottish Parliament.

Period	5 Aug 2024
Event title	‘Bad Habits’ in Historical Perspective, 1750-2000, (ERC Starting Grant project DIASPORA).
Event type	Conference
Location	Dublin, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International