Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers

Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium—following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers—and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics.

For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium—how it was farmed, refine...