It takes a long time to pull a Special Issue for The Historical Journal together! The idea behind Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization crystallised as long ago as 2016, when me, Kathryn James, and Angela McShane started discussing how we might begin to unpack the spaces, practices, and material culture that characterised the production and consumption of intoxicants in Europe, the Atlantic, and South Asia between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Two trans-Atlantic workshops and five years of commissioning, presenting, writing, editing, submitting, reviewing, more writing, more reviewing, etc., later, it’s wonderful to see the 11 articles and Introduction comprising the Issue appearing on HJ’s early view platform FirstView. Because the official issue will be published in January 2022, we thought it useful to bring the articles that will feature in the special issue together in advance of that for anyone interested in previewing the issue. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed bringing them together.

Access the articles appearing in the special issue here or click on the article titles below to go straight to the articles you are most interested in:

• Introduction to Intoxicants and Early Modern European Globalization, Kathryn James, Phil Withington
• The Intoxicant as Preservative and Scientific Instrument in the World of James Petiver, Kathryn James
• The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World, Benjamin Breen
• Opium, Experimentation, and Alterity in France, E. C. Spary
• Tobacco and the Social Life of Conquest in London, 1580–1625, Lauren Working
• Tobacco-Taking and Identity-Making in Early Modern Britain and North America, Angela McShane
• Tropical Hospitality, British Masculinity, and Drink in Late Eighteenth-Century Jamaica, Trevor Burnard
• Addiction, Intoxicants, and the Humoral Body, Phil Withington
• The ambivalences of alcohol in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English East India Company, Philip J. Stern
• A copper still and the making of rum in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Nuala Zahedieh
• Smoking clubs in graphic satire and the Anglicizing of tobacco in eighteenth-century England, Cynthia Roman
• Boston in New England, intoxicant town, Mark Peterson

Main image: Two women both taking snuff. Coloured stipple engraving after L. Boilly, ca. 1827 Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)