It’s always exciting to see a publication – especially a collaborative publication – come to fruition, and so it was with great pleasure that I received my copy of this weighty tome, The Routledge Handbook of Intoxicants and Intoxication, edited by Geoffrey Hunt, Tamar M. J. Antin, and Vibeke Asmussen Frank in 2023.

The book covers an extraordinary range of topics, ranging across intoxicants, chronologies, geographies, and disciplines, and is organized into sections on The Terrain of Intoxication, The Social Life of Intoxicants, Intoxicating Settings, Intoxication Practices, Alternative Approaches for Studying Intoxication, Scapegoated Substances, Discourses Shaping Intoxication and People who use Intoxicants, and Notions of Excess. As an editor myself of several books, including a similarly huge Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands (more on this another time), I know how incredibly challenging it is to put a book like this together. Even more so that the editors managed to see this through during one of the most disrupted periods of scholarly activity I’ve known in my career. So I found it really inspiring to read the introduction, which discussed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on contributors’ working lives and personal lives in depth and with great compassion and humanity.

The chapter that Lucas Brunozi Avelar and I co-authored on Alcohol, Slavery and Race in Brazil appears in the “Scapegoated Substances” section of the book and explains “how and why drunkenness emerged as a significant concern for the Brazilian state in the first half of the nineteenth century.” Here is the introduction paragraph setting out the main points of argument, which are also discussed in this previous post, when Lucas and I explained the chapter’s core ideas at the DSN@10 conference in late 2021:

In the 1830s, shortly after achieving independence as a nation, Brazilian authorities launched a series of measures to tackle drunkenness, which they considered to be a major social problem. In this chapter, we examine how and why drunkenness emerged as a significant concern for the Brazilian state in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the longer-term process of racializing drinking behaviors from colonial Brazil to the twentieth century. We argue that the stigmatization of certain types of drinks, drinking places and drinking practices has been a central component of the history of racial discrimination in Brazil. In the early nineteenth century, the expansion of the slave trade led to increasingly restrictive and violent measures to control the enslaved population. For the enslaved themselves, alcohol was integrated into their culture and consumed for a variety of reasons, including as a means of resisting slavery. For slave owners, alcohol had been used as a form of currency and to increase labor productivity, but its use was also considered a threat to their control. The escalation in anti-drunkenness legislation in the early nineteenth century contributed to political and social efforts to justify and prolong the slave system as well as to build the Brazilian state. When slavery was abolished in 1888 and a republic established in 1889, the political and economic elite put forward new plans to change drinking practices that continued to racialize drinking behaviors but in different ways. Distilled spirits were described as causing alcoholism and racial degeneration, while beer was promoted as part of efforts to modernize, de-Africanize and ultimately “whiten” Brazil as it moved into the twentieth century.

Lucas Brunozi Avelar and Deborah Toner, “Alcohol, Slavery and Race in Brazil during the long Nineteenth Century,” in The Routledge Handbook of Intoxicants and Intoxication, eds. Geoffrey Hunt, Tamar M.J. Antin, and Vibeke Asmussen Frank (London: Routledge, 2023).

Rather than go through our argument in more detail – you can after all, go and read the book! – I want to reflect a little on the process of collaborative writing. I’ve co-authored a number of publications and the collaborative process has worked differently each time. What I’ve found to be consistent across these different experiences is how enjoyable and comparatively easy it is: comparative, that is, to writing an academic publication as a sole author. Staring anguishedly at a blank screen is a standard stage of my writing process, but it lasts for much less time when I’m writing with others.

In this chapter, Lucas conducted the bulk of the original research underpinning it, including all the Portuguese-language sources, while I did some supplementary research connecting developments in Brazil to similar processes elsewhere in Latin America and beyond. Lucas shared a detailed account of his primary research, including passages of analysis of particularly rich archival and published primary sources, together with some preliminary feedback from the book’s editors about how the chapter should be framed. I then mapped out the chapter’s main arguments and sections, and we both then worked to populate each section with the detailed discussion, passing drafts back and forth until we were happy with it. Following feedback from the DSN@10 conference paper, from the book editors and from those they asked to peer review the chapter, we gradually worked it into its final form.

Getting high quality images and permissions for inclusion in publications is always a tricky part of the process, but with a little perseverance we were very happy to include a number of beer advertisements from the early twentieth century that helped to illustrate powerfully a key part of our conclusion about the differential stigmatization of particular drinks for their association with particular demographics rather than a blanket demonization of all forms of alcohol. And if that tantalizing teaser doesn’t get you to go looking for the book to see more…