Taft Lecture, History: Dr Paul Gootemberg, "The 'Pre-Colombian' Era of Drug Trafficking in the Americas"

Paul Gootenberg, Professor of History at Stony Brook University, and author of "Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug" (UNC Press, 2009) discusses a dramatic chapter in the transnational history of global commodity flows: the invention of illicit cocaine. The sudden emergence of shifting drug trafficking centers and innovating trafficker diasporas from South America to the United States, from 1947-1973, followed a surprising logic of the U.S.-exported Cold War and repressive drug policies —leaving, in its wake, one of the largest and most notorious commodity booms of world history.



Date of the talk: May 28, 2010

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