Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition

Villanova political science professor Schrad (Vodka Politics) offers an exhaustive and eye-opening reevaluation of the global temperance movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Though histories of prohibition tend to cast it as a “uniquely American phenomenon” instigated by “nativist evangelicals,” Schrad shows that temperance was an international social movement championed by leaders as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi, Vladimir Lenin, Kemal Atatürk, and Native American chief Black Hawk. Schrad details extensive links between the temperance and other progressive causes, including abolition, socialism, universal suffrage, and labor rights, as well as anticolonialism in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, where the liquor trade was regarded by local activists as a tool of imperialism. In Schrad’s view, temperance wasn’t “a moralizing crusade against individual liberty” but the embodiment of “a normative shift in which the exploitation of the weak, impoverished, and defenseless citizens for the benefit of predatory capitalists and a predatory state were no longer considered appropriate.” Infused with knowledgeable sketches of world affairs and vivid profiles of activists and political figures including Carrie Nation and Swedish prime minister Hjalmar Branting, this is an authoritative reassessment of a misunderstood chapter in world history. (July)