Social Science Research Council

"The Acacia and the Poppy: Drugs and Development in Early Twentieth-Century Dairen"

My dissertation investigates the impact of the drug culture on urban political economy and social formations in the Manchurian city of Dairen throughout the period of Japanese control (1905-1945).  In the early twentieth century, Dairen, the leading city of the Kwantung Leased Territory, presented itself as a consummately modern, Japanese colonial capital.  Yet Dairen also constituted the world's second-largest drug shipping and distribution port, and its residents consumed the highest per-capita volume of opiates recorded in history.  I seek to connect Dairen's position as a drug nexus with the city's role in the local, regional and global political economy.  I also plan to deconstruct the ways in which society responded to the culture of narcotics in which it was submerged.  In so doing, I shall look at the information culture, ideology, legal system, medical sphere and social control network engendered and changed by opiates in the urban context.  Through this project, I hope to contribute to the growing field of 'Manshu studies,' to highlight the salience of the opium trade in Japanese empire-building, and to return agency to Japanese and Chinese actors in this 'transnational` region.  In broader terms, I aspire to increase our understanding of the early twentieth-century city, to underline the centrality of the illegal substance trade to the making of the contemporary world, and to further efforts to integrate the study of the Japanese empire into global history.