In October, I was delighted to appear as a guest on Dan Snow’s History Hit podcast, discussing the relationship between alcohol and colonialism across time, which you can listen to below.
The title of the episode is a little misleading, as our discussion ranged beyond the British Empire, touching on how alcohol featured in economic, political and socio-cultural relations between Indigenous societies and different colonising powers around the world from the sixteenth century up to the twentieth century.
Some of the podcast explored different themes that are covered in more depth in my recently published book, Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, 1850-1950, which Dan was beyond gracious to say had “blown his mind”. Wowsers, and thank you! It inspired me to put together a thread on twitter, in which I outlined the acknowledgements page that would have been in the book, if I had managed to notice that it wasn’t there through several copy-editing and proofing stages…
Doing the podcast was a really fun experience; Dan is a very engaging host and asks great questions. You can catch more episodes of History Hit, which are published on a close to daily basis, over on acast.
In July 2021, Jamie Banks and I gave a joint conference presentation at the ‘Intoxicating Spaces: Global and Comparative Perspectives‘ Conference, hosted virtually by the University of Sheffield. This was based on our work-in-progress research on how international anti-alcohol congresses served as spaces for the global exchange of ideas about alcohol, race and racial difference in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We’re delighted a little nervous to share the recorded conference presentation with you all, just because it’s still a little weird to have such things recorded, even though we’ve all been video recording ourselves a lot over the last couple of years. Anyway, here it is!
The first major international anti-alcohol conference, the Antwerp Meeting against the Abuse of Alcoholic Beverages, took place in 1885 and twenty-one further conferences took place by 1939. These meetings were attended not only by official representatives of government bodies and temperance organisations, but also by researchers from a variety of disciplines and independent delegates. Conference proceedings, including agendas, delegate lists, papers presented and minuted discussions, provide a range of contemporary perspectives on how alcohol was thought to affect individuals, social groups, and entire nations.
For this paper we concentrated on how the congresses were spaces in which attendees from around the globe came to share, consolidate, and disseminate ideas about the degenerative influence of alcohol and alcoholism on people from different ethnic groups in colonial, settler colonial and non-colonial parts of the world. In doing so, we discussed how these global discussions about alcohol contributed to the ongoing development of ideas about race and racial difference, which were in turn shaped by broader concerns about colonialism, social inequalities, and competing assertions of modern ‘nationhood.’ Finally, we raised some preliminary thoughts about how the Anti-Alcohol Congresses might allow us to trace the dissemination of ideas about race back into national contexts, as well as their entwining with trans-national debates about anti-alcohol activism, anti-slavery groups and other ostensibly humanitarian campaigns.
The ‘Intoxicating Spaces‘ Conference had an incredible range of papers on alcohol history, as well as other intoxicants such as opium, ecstasy, cannabis, coffee, and tobacco, and themes such as material culture, discourse, regulation and authority, mobility and circulation. It was part of the ongoing major research project ‘Intoxicating Spaces: The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600-1850’, which examines how a variety of intoxicants – cocoa, coffee, opium, sugar, tea and tobacco in particular – formed part of what the researchers call a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the modern world. The project concentrates on transformations in the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Stockholm, and they have a fabulous website, with lots of resources. Go check it out!
Originally, I had intended to write my first post for the project blog on “research impact.” Across two blog posts, my intention was to try to demystify what impact meant for early career researchers, in a Higher Education context, explain its importance, and detail how the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project, and my separate post-doctoral project, sought to achieve it. I have the first half of that blog in my drafts folder, and I intend to finish and publish them at some point in the future. In the current context, however – read *global pandemic* – it seemed superfluous, if not also a tad detached, to publish such a post. Indeed, as I have been procrastinating over the past few weeks, I have become convinced that the last thing the internet needed, at present, was a blog about impact. Thus, instead, I want to talk about the impact of COVID-19. My intention here is not to talk about how COVID has fundamentally reshaped the Higher Education landscape, nor to offer any advice on how to adapt to the emerging reality of remote teaching and learning (excellent examples offering such advice can be found here). Instead, I want to reflect upon my increasing, if not obvious, realisation that things – not least of all travel plans, research activities, job specs – can and do change, and that said change is okay.
Before I get into it, a little about me. My name is Jamie Banks. I am writing here as the Research Associate on the Alcohol Race, and Ethnicity project and have been in the role since December 2019. In this role, it is my job to assist the Principal Investigator, Deborah Toner, with archival research for the project, associated conferences (more on this later), impact-related work, and documenting the research process through blog posts like this one. Aside from this role, I am also starting a University of Leicester – Wellcome Trust funded Postdoctoral Fellowship. This project focuses upon cannabis use and mental illness in colonial Jamaica and post-colonial Britain. Finally, I had the recent (dis)pleasure of finishing off and submitting my PhD thesis, on opium use and indentured labour in Mauritius, British Guiana and Trinidad, during the current global predicament. So, now we know each other a little bit better, I want to get to the heart of what this blog post is about, namely how COVID has forced both positive and negatives changes to both my role on the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project and my own, post-doctoral research. More fundamentally, however, I want to illustrate how these changes, while not always appreciated, reflect one of the key skills of being an academic – adaptability.
Things change. This is perhaps one of the sagest pieces of advice I was ever offered as a PhD student, and thus it remains one of the key things I say to others looking at a project which looks nothing like their PhD applications. But while this might seem obvious enough, the conventional path of academic progression (if such an abstract concept exists) is often predicated upon making promises and demonstrating skills that have to seem immutable. For instance, my application to become the Research Associate on the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project had to clearly outline a wide variety of skills and competencies I was expected to possess – least of which was a PhD, though many of them were undoubtedly developed through doing doctoral research – as well as a series of duties and roles I was expected to perform.
Similarly, in applying for my Wellcome Trust fellowship, this sense of immutability seemed even more apparent. Not only did I have to write a comprehensive outline of my proposed project, and its importance for broader scholarship, I also had to send my project expenses to the finance department, to be forwarded as part of my application. While I was already used to budgeting my own finances, thanks to the generosity of my AHRC studentship, the minutiae of detail expected was more extensive, and thus seemingly more rigid, than any of the one or two week research trips I had planned during my PhD. All of this is to say that the process of applying for jobs and grants can perpetuate a sense that, as an academic, one should know what they are doing well before they do it, knowing our projects inside out and following them without deviation.
Of course, the reality couldn’t be more far from the truth. For instance, what I eventually submitted as my PhD looked nothing like the application I spent months writing to apply for it in the first place. Similarly, I increasingly write conference paper abstracts with the knowledge that no-one expects the paper I eventually present to fit the bill exactly. Thus, what I want to illustrate, in the rest of this blog, are some of the ad hoc changes to my work and responsibilities that have resulted from COVID, and how dealing with these changes represents a perhaps even more key skill than excellent research skills or amassing publications.
So, let’s start with COVID and my PhD. Honestly, I have been incredibly lucky given minimal the impact of the pandemic on the final months of competing my thesis. Sure, I had to complete my thesis from the confines of my flat, but I usually work from home anyway, so it was not great heart-ache. I also completed my overseas archival research in my second and third years, meaning that I, unlike so many unlucky others, was not faced with a desperate scramble to find alternative, online sources. Indeed, the only real issue for me, in practical terms, has been the inability to hold a post-thesis submission celebration in the pub and that my viva was held online.
With all this said, I am perhaps still not being all that honest about the parallel impact COVID has had upon my mental health. Completing a PhD is stressful, at the best of times, so the limited movement and cooping-up which has resulted from social distancing hasn’t done me any good. With this, I have also had to increasingly realise that I simply can’t work to the same extent as I have done previously. The days are punctuated by far more frequent and elongated pauses than there used to be. I also consider even small tasks, such as writing and editing this blog, as far greater victories than I might have done before. This has come with its own complications – not least an impending sense of guilt for “not doing enough” – but has nevertheless underscored the fact that I am not a machine, nor should I expect to be at times such as these.
The current pandemic has also resulted in some pretty significant changes to my responsibilities on the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project. Originally, a significant proportion of my time was allocated to helping to organise two one-day workshops and several panels at the Drinking Studies Network’s ten-year anniversary conference (DSN@10), originally planned for November 2020. These were roles which I had pushed for, in particular, in order to give me valuable networking and events organisation experience. However, as Deborah has discussed in an earlier blog, the pandemic resulted in the first of these workshops, held in May 2020, being moved to an online format. This move had its own challenges – not least time zones and zoom updates – but overall the workshop was a success and laid the foundations for an envisioned collaborative project between participants.
Nevertheless, the pandemic has had a longer term effect on my responsibilities for the project. With the decision being made to move the DSN@10 conference to November 2021, we were faced with the decision of how I would spend my hours on the project in the meantime. After some discussion, we came to an agreement that I should now direct my attention towards co-authoring a journal article with Deborah. If all goes to plan, the article will discuss the articulation and consolidation of competing ideas about “race,” as expressed by discussants and attendees at the International Anti-Alcohol conferences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were international forums in which politicians, medical personnel, and temperance activists, from across the globe, came together in order to discuss the political, social, and economic implications of alcohol consumption.
Delegates of the 15th International Congress Against Alcoholism, Washington DC, 1920. Photograph from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, National Photo Company Collection.
On the one hand, this change wasn’t bad at all. I am, by my own admission, a better historian than I am an organiser, so the change suits me well. It has also filled the last couple of months with hours of transcribing papers in French, German, and Italian, while listening to various True Crimes podcasts, as I have come across various interesting things about the sale of absinthe and brandy in various African colonies. Finally, the switch from conference organising to planning a journal article has afforded me with the opportunity to work even more closely with Deborah, whose work on alcohol history I first became interested in during the second year of my undergraduate degree. On the other hand, however, this change also has its implications. While I of course do not begrudge the change (how could I, given the circumstances?), it does mean that my responsibilities include a lesser focus on organisation and networking. I relish the opportunity to do some collaborative writing, of course, but I also appreciate that this is experience which is ever more vital in the increasingly competitive field that is post-doctoral funding.
The current pandemic is also likely to present difficulties for my own post-doctoral research fellowship. Before I go into this any further, I want to acknowledge that I know I am lucky to have such an issue at all, given how competitive post-doctoral opportunities were even before the pandemic. The most apparent of these is the implications which the pandemic poses for travel. Originally, it had been my intention to spend two weeks in Kingston, Jamaica, in order to consult records in the National Archives, as well as to peruse the various collections of the University of the West Indies. My hope, in doing so, would have been to find archival references to cannabis use amongst Indian indentured migrants in Jamaica, which haven’t been discussed in considerable detail in the existing scholarship. Currently, however, I have no idea if I will be able to travel to Kingston during the nine months of my Fellowship.
Not travelling to Kingston, of course, is certainly not the end of the world. For starters, I have alternative options to focus on instead, most notably the Colonial Office records held at The National Archives, Kew. Similarly, the fact I have funding which should allow me to travel to Jamaica at all is an advantage that I know many recently-submitted PhD students simply do not have. However, my hesitancy to travel now or in the immediate future nevertheless possesses its own issues. Firstly, not going to Kingston means not being able to access materials in archival collections. This means that I will be unable to assess these materials until an unknown time in the future, should I be lucky enough to get funding to do so. There is also the fact that not having access to these materials will, for the time being, likely result in a project which departs, to some extent, from what I had originally envisioned. Initially, I had hoped to contrast colonial and post-colonial discussions of cannabis and mental illness, but now I am much more likely to focus on the post-colonial discussions, in medical journals, for the time being.
So, what has been my point in writing this blog? I guess my first point, while obvious, has been that the current pandemic has resulted in all sorts of unanticipated changes to various aspects of my working life. From working less, to changing responsibilities, and finally to shifting the focus of my source base for my project, the pandemic has resulted in some fundamental changes. The other point that I wanted to stress is that times like these reveal the fact that academia is not a one and done process, in which people, at all times, know and can anticipate what they are going to do. While we can all make the best laid plans, be they job applications, grant applications, or travel agendas, those plans change and do so often, for a variety of reasons. Thus, it is important to stress that these changes do not constitute the end of the world (although it can often seem close). There are always thing you can do if you source basis evaporates, your job spec. changes, or the risk of dying prevents foreign travel and that, figuring out how to manage these issues is one of the key skills and day-to-day realities of being an academic, more so now than ever.
I have been thinking about racial stereotypes connected with drinking behaviour in one way or another since the first year of my undergraduate degree in History – way back in 2002! The issue was raised by a session within a module on the Social History of Food in Latin America and, from there, questions about racial stereotypes remained in the background of my MA and PhD research on the history of alcohol in Mexico. Through my own teaching at the University of Leicester, particularly a course I designed called “From Beer to Fraternity: Alcohol, Society and Culture in North America“, discussions at various Drinking Studies Network events, and research for an edited book, A Cultural History of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War, 1850 to 1950, I increasingly considered the question of racial stereotypes about alcohol use to be of transnational and global significance.
Through these different avenues of exploration, I found that research from a range of disciplines on alcohol-related harm showed there is a real need to deconstruct racial stereotypes about drinking. Stereotypes have perpetuated prejudice against Native Americans and Hispanic Americans, encouraged aggressive marketing of distilled drinks to African Americans, and reduced opportunities for Asian Americans to seek help for drinking problems.[1] Racially differentiated alcohol regulations in Australia, based on long-standing racial stereotypes about Indigenous drinking, have compounded rather than reduced alcohol-related harm.[2] The so-called “drunken Indian” stereotype still shapes the attitudes of US government officials involved in harm reduction programmes for Native Americans, and the internalisation of racial stereotypes about drinking helps to cause alcohol-related harm amongst Native Americans.[3] Explaining how and why racial stereotypes about drinking have developed historically through cultural processes of othering in the United States, Mexico and the wider world, as I aim to do in this project, is a critical step in reducing the harm that they still do.
Historians have clearly established the role of anti-immigrant prejudice in garnering support for the United States policy of national prohibition (1920-33), and the century-long temperance movement from which it grew. Enforcement of the national prohibition law was disproportionately targeted against ethnic minorities, especially Mexican Americans, African Americans and poor European immigrants.[4] Widespread perceptions about the tendency of Native Americans towards excessive drinking meant that prohibition laws had already been applied to them in the nineteenth century and persisted long after national prohibition was repealed.[5]
In Mexico, cultural misunderstandings about Indigenous alcohol use and the commercialisation of alcohol contributed to the development of a stereotype about Indigenous drunkenness during the colonial period (1521-1810).[6] By the late nineteenth century, degeneration theory – the idea that physical, mental and moral defects were passed down from generation to generation – transformed alcohol abuse into a major threat to racial and national health.[7]
Shameless plug alert: you can read more about this point on degeneration theory in my first book, Alcohol and Nationhood in 19th Century Mexico
Mexico’s more limited policies of prohibition in the early twentieth century have been less thoroughly researched than the US experience of prohibition, but anti-alcohol campaigns foregrounded concerns about Indigenous drinking practices more than those of other ethnic groups.[8]
In the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project, I aim to draw together these distinct historiographies to provide a systematic analysis of what different racial stereotypes about alcohol had in common, how they interacted and how they changed over time in the US and Mexico. The goal is to analyse the relationship between these stereotypes in the context of changing power dynamics across borders. In turn, this should help to reveal the importance of debates about alcohol to the construction of modern ideas about race and racial difference.
This approach
responds to and advances recent calls to analyse the increasingly transnational
and global nature of debates about alcohol in the nineteenth and twentieth
century. Mills and Barton acknowledged the role of racial stereotypes about
alcohol and other drugs in the legitimisation of European imperialism but
called for more research on how such ideas were “transferred and circulated,
and with what effects.”[9] Pliley et al examine some
transnational aspects of anti-alcohol activism but highlight the need for more
comprehensive studies of transnational actors, ideas and processes. They also encourage
research to go beyond the geographical limits of Euro-American imperialism and
to go beyond traditional organisational studies of temperance groups.[10]
Several
small-scale studies of the relationship between alcohol and racial stereotypes indicate
how transformative a larger, transnational and comparative study could be. Historians
of colonial North and Spanish America have shown how “drunken Indian”
stereotypes became embedded in discourses of Indigenous weakness, impurity and
barbarism.[11]
Gaytán compared the racialised meanings of particular drinks in Mexico and the
United States in the early twentieth century, revealing how the American press
associated tequila with a stereotype of Mexicans as volatile, savage and
inferior.[12]
Guatemalan alcohol policies in the early twentieth century were driven by
racial assumptions that Indigenous people were more susceptible to alcohol
problems, despite evidence that non-Indigenous Guatemalans drank in socially
disruptive ways more frequently.[13] Debates about alcohol
prohibition in Southern Nigeria in the early twentieth century were central to
the formation and challenging of ideas about racial difference between Africans
and Europeans.[14]
In focusing on the US and Mexico from 1845 to 1940, in the first part of this fellowship project, I want to examine how multiple racial stereotypes about the drinking behaviours of different ethnic groups were formulated in dialogue with each other. I’ll also be combining analysis of official and popular perspectives about alcohol during points of transnational exchange. These include cultures of consumption of soldiers in the Mexican American War; early marketing practices of alcoholic products in international exhibitions; debates about alcohol regulation and harm in international conferences; and anti-alcohol activism that crossed borders through temperance tours.
I’ll close here with some of the key research questions I’ll be exploring as part of this fellowship project:
1. What racial language, imagery and concepts were used in describing the drinking behaviours of different ethnic groups in the United States and Mexico between 1845 and 1940?
2. How and why did racial stereotypes about drinking solidify around some ethnic groups but not others?
3. To what extent did American and Mexican ideas about alcohol and race interact with one another?
4. Was the racialisation of drinking behaviours a global phenomenon?
[1] R. Caetano, C.L. Clark
and T. Tam, ‘Alcohol Consumption among Racial/Ethnic Minorities: Theory and
Research,’ Alcohol Health and Research
World, 22:4 (1998).
[2] P. D’Abbs, ‘Alcohol
Policy and Aboriginal Drinking in the Northern Territory, Australia,’ Contemporary Drug Problems, 39 (2012).
[3] M.D. Holmes and J.A.
Antell, ‘The Social Construction of American Indian Drinking: Perceptions of
American Indian and White Officials,’ The
Sociological Quarterly, 42:2 (2001); J. Fish, T.M. Osberg and M. Syed,
‘Alcohol Beliefs and Acculturation in Relation to Alcohol Consumption among
Native Americans,’ Journal of Ethnicity
in Substance Abuse, 16:2 (2017).
[4] L. McGirr, The War on Alcohol (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2016).
[5] I. Ishii, ‘Alcohol and
Politics in the Cherokee Nation Before Removal,’ Ethnohistory, 50:4 (2003); R. Phillips, Alcohol: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2014).
[6] J.M. Córdova, ‘Notes
on the Drunken Indian Image in Colonial Mexico,’ Word & Image, 31:1 (2015).
[7] D. Toner, Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century
Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
[8] G. Pierce, ‘Mexico’s
National Anti-Alcohol Campaign and the Process of State-Building, 1934-1940,’ Social History of Alcohol and Drugs,
23:2 (2009).
[9] J.H. Mills and P.
Barton (eds), Drugs and Empire: Essays in
Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500-c.1930 (Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),pp.
14-15.
[10] J.R. Pliley, R. Kramm
and H. Fischer-Tiné (eds), Global
Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017).
[11] R. Earle, ‘Indians and
Drunkenness in Spanish America,’ Past and
Present, Supplement 9 (2014); P. Mancall, Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995); J.A. Fernandes, ‘Alcohol, Identity and Social Hierarchy in
Colonial Brazil,’ in G. Pierce and Á. Toxqui (eds), Alcohol in Latin America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014).
[12] M. S. Gaytán,
‘Drinking Difference: Race, Consumption, and Alcohol Prohibition in Mexico and
the United States,’ Ethnicities, 14:3
(2014).
[13] D. Carey Jr., ‘Drunks
and Dictators: Inebriation’s Gendered, Ethnic, and Class Components in
Guatemala, 1898-1944,’ in Pierce and Toxqui, Alcohol in Latin America.
[14] C. Ambler, “The Specter of Degeneration: Alcohol and Race in West Africa in the Early Twentieth Century” in Pliley et al, Global Anti-Vice Activism.
