2021 AIHP/UW School of Pharmacy Summer Kreminar 2: Diana S. Kim—3 Empires of Vice (5/20)

Please enjoy this video from the second annual Edward Kremers Seminar in the History of Pharmacy & Drugs. The Summer 2021 “Kreminar” explored the theme of Opiates & Opioids and featured six virtual seminars, presentations, and discussions by scholars and practitioners researching and writing about the history and the contemporary status of opiates, opioids, and addiction. Hosts and sponsors of the Summer 2021 Kreminar were: The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy; The University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy; The University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences; and The Alcohol and Drugs History Society. The second presentation was by Dr. Diana S. Kim on May 20, 2021, speaking about, “The Humanity of Addiction: What We Can Learn from Families, Educators, and Practitioners.” Dr. Diana S. Kim is assistant professor of political science at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research and teaching focuses on the transnational politics and history of markets across Southeast and East Asia, with particular interest in the regulation of vice, illicit economies, theories of crime and disorder, state formation, and legacies of Empire and colonialism. Diana has worked as a consultant for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and her scholarship has been awarded prizes from the American Bar Foundation and the Social Science History Association. Abstract: During the late nineteenth century, opium was integral to European colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The taxation of opium was a major source of revenue for British and French colonizers, who also derived moral authority from imposing a tax on a peculiar vice of their non-European subjects. Yet between the 1890s and the 1940s, colonial states began to ban opium, upsetting the very foundations of overseas rule—how did this happen? This talk explores the history of this dramatic reversal and colonial legacies that set the stage for the region’s drug problems today. Diana Kim challenges the conventional wisdom about opium prohibition—that it came about because doctors awoke to the dangers of drug addiction or that it was a response to moral crusaders—uncovering a more complex story deep within the colonial bureaucracy. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence across Southeast Asia and Europe, she shows how prohibition was made possible through the pivotal contributions of seemingly weak bureaucratic officials. Comparing British and French experiences across today’s Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, Kim explains how the everyday work of local administrators delegitimized the taxing of opium, which in turn made major anti-opium reforms possible. This talk is based on her book, Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press, 2020), which reveals more generally the inner life of colonial bureaucracy, illuminating how European rulers reconfigured their opium-entangled foundations of governance and durably shaped Southeast Asia’s political economy of illicit drugs. For more information about the 2021 Kreminar, please visit: https://aihp.org/kreminar/summer-2021-opioids/