Project blog
Focusing on four European cities between c.1600 and c.1850 - Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Stockholm - this two-year project (2019-21) explores the impact of new intoxicants on urban public spaces, the role of urban public spaces in assimilating them into European behaviours, and the often exploitative international systems through which they were produced, trafficked, and consumed. Via our events, our online exhibition, and our work with museums, NGOs, and schools, we hope to demonstrate that understanding these processes offers a vital historical perspective on urgent contemporary questions surrounding drug use and abuse, addiction, migration, inclusion and exclusion within public spaces, and the place of intoxicating substances within everyday life.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
Tobacco Coffee Project Updates Slavery, Colonialism, and Empire Art Geography Material Culture Tea England Alcohol Sugar Netherlands Opium Medicine Amsterdam Botanicals Guest Posts London Apothecaries Chocolate
Love and Intoxication in a Renaissance Pleasure Palace
23 January 2023
This short film documents my collaboration with Phil Withington, other academics, and creative partners to explore the significance of intoxicants in Ben Jonson’s The New Inn, and...
Our Virtual Exhibition is Now Live!
21 December 2022
Following a well-attended launch event last month, we’re thrilled to report that the project’s Virtual Exhibition is now fully live! Three years in the making, and conceived as...
5 March 2022
The word ‘intoxicant’ has a central place in this project, as in wider scholarship. But what does the term really mean, and why do historians use it so regularly? Intoxicant is...
Getting to the Root of It: Saloop in Early Modern London
8 February 2022
After a long night of ‘frolicking’, which included plenty of drinking, the friends George Price and Samuel Plumpton continued their evening with a hot dish purchased from a stall....