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- Description
About this Course
About the Course
In this course, Dr Benjamin Smith (University of Warwick) gives an account of the drug trade in Mexico from the pre-colonial period to the present day. After a brief history of the South American continent, including an account of the use of psychotropic and other drugs by the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent, the course goes to explore how and why the Spanish attempted to prohibit the use of drugs after their arrival from the early 16th century onwards, and how prohibitions on drugs, and the fight against the illegal production and distribution of drugs has continued into the 20th and 21st centuries.
About the Lecturer
Dr Benjamin Smith is currently Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University of Warwick, where he teaches several courses on Latin America, 20th-Century Mexico and the Mexican Drug Trade.
As a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century grassroots politics, he has done most of his research in the archives, villages, churches, and markets of the predominantly indigenous state of Oaxaca. His first book, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca attempted to capture the diversity of post-revolutionary politics and looked at regional bosses, female-led social movements, violence, and agrarian reform from the 1920s through to the 1950s. He has also co-edited a collection of essays on the subject, entitled Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968, which was published in early 2014.