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

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 has remained largely untold.

Markets of Paintraces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated ...