The Origins of Cocaine

Download or read book The Origins of Cocaine written by Paul Gootenberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s, the governments of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia launched agricultural settlement programs in each country’s vast Amazonian frontier lowlands. Two decades later, these exact same zones had transformed into the centers of the illicit cocaine boom of the Americas. Drawing on concepts from both history and anthropology, The Origins of Cocaine explores how three countries with divergent different mid-century political trajectories ended up with parallel outcomes in illicit frontier economies and cocalero cultures. Bringing together transnational, national, and local analyses, the volume provides an in-depth examination of the deep origins of drug economics in the Americas. As the first substantial study on the shift from agrarian colonization to narcotization, The Origins of Cocaine will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of Latin American history, anthropology, globalization, development and environmental studies.