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Much historical and ethnographic research highlights a long relationship of humanity with psychoactive substances. However, most of this research has focused on prehistoric and ancient Europe, Asia, and the Americas, leaving Africa relatively neglected, and creating the misconception that African drug production, trade, and use is comparatively recent. This chapter shows instead that Africa has a long and important relationship with drugs as varied as khat, kola, datura, and iboga. It surveys Africa’s complex indigenous pharmacopeia of stimulants and intoxicants and their varied cultures of consumption, as well as substances that if external in origin, like cannabis, have been widely used for centuries across Africa. The chapter suggests a more nuanced and critical context for the contemporary threat illicit drug trades pose to the continent, in understanding Africa’s drug cultures in the longue durée.

Early states in the Americas integrated drugs and alcohol into their strategies of rule in diverse ways and to varying degrees. This chapter evaluates current scholarship on the relationships between rulers and drugs in the two main areas of primary state formation: Mesoamerica and the Andes, with a particular focus on the Maya, Aztec, and Incan states as they emerged and developed in the centuries before European contact. Key issues considered are the variable incorporation of shamanic ritual and hallucinogenic drugs into state cults centered on rulers, the effects of such integration on early state attempts to control consumption through sumptuary laws and other such “drug policies,” and the material and cultural dynamics of drug trade and use among the populations of these regions. The chapter ends on the historical legacies: the degree to which such politics and dynamics affected options of later colonial and national states in the Americas.

This chapter focuses on sport historiography in Australia and New Zealand, with three broad aims: to survey historic and historiographic developments, to consider the historiographical predominance of team ball sports, and to chart new and emerging directions. While sport had long formed part of popular discourse in both countries, in the 1980s historians began to analyze sport comprehensively, and the decades since have witnessed a substantial growth in sports historiography produced by academic scholars. Research has had a particular focus on certain sports, especially cricket, rugby, and Australian Rules football, which has been problematic in terms of its exclusivity and yet generative of important scholarly discussion and debate. New research directions, especially those emerging from an increased engagement with the cultural turn in the past decade, have yielded important studies into the fields of affect, bodies, materiality, visuality, and other areas new or rare in sports history.

This article shows that many different ways of inhabiting the city were already developed in antiquity and uncovers some of the basic tensions between (economic and other) dependence and independence that meant that cities always required, but often also disowned, broader networks. It begins with a discussion of the peculiar character of the ancient Mediterranean city. It then shows how the history of the Mediterranean city in antiquity is a history of the formation and exploitation of networks of cities, and of competition between differently organized networks. It explores something of the variety of different cities that are developed to play specialist parts within these networks. While acknowledging that relatively densely populated and large communities always demand some political organization and depend upon a larger economic network, it emphasizes that neither politics nor the economy are necessarily the primary motivations for urbanization. It identifies ways in which cities are used by groups with very limited political or economic power.

This article examines the growth and distinctive character of colonial cities as they developed over time. It begins with discussions of the early modern period and the great age of empire in the nineteenth century. It then focuses on design and planning, governance, the distinctive settler cities, and the impact of decolonization. Throughout it argues that colonial urbanism was intimately connected to — and helped sustain — the growth of the emerging capitalist world order. Yet, at the same time, the process of colonial urbanism was affected not only by the varied policies pursued by the different European powers, but, as well, by the activities of local peoples as they endeavoured to come to terms with, and helped shape, the new urban world in which they found themselves.

This chapter explores the recent wave of revisionist research on the consumption and control of drugs in Asia from the nineteenth century onward. Examples from China, India, and across Southeast Asia suggest that familiar Asian drug narratives were often based on colonial-era racial or nationalist stereotypes. Monolithic actors such as the “Chinese government,” “British imperialists,” “Japanese invaders,” or “Indian princes” dissolve in the complexities of period and place. Fresh research stresses the agency of Asian customers and their tastes, habits, and practices, given sophisticated local cultures of consumption. Other histories portray a tangled competitive scramble to supply Asian markets for intoxicants and psychoactive drugs, where the lines between commerce and government control constantly shifted. Research has moved beyond opium into the twentieth century, when drugs like cannabis, morphine, heroin, and cocaine map onto Asia’s changing connections with global commodity flows. Ideas about Asian drug use informed the emerging international drugs regulatory system.

The Columbian Exchange refers to the flow of plants, animals and microbes across the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. Coined in 1972 by the historian Alfred Crosby, the Columbian Exchange set in motion Christopher Columbus' historic voyage to the Americas in 1492. Crosby used the term "Columbian Exchange" to describe the process of biological diffusion that arose following Europe's colonization of the Americas. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 chronicled the wide-ranging consequences of the transfer of diseases, plants and animals that ensued after 1492. The book, essentially consisting of a series of interlocking essays, documented the impact of Old World plants and animals on the Americas, the global dissemination of New World foods, and how European colonization resulted in the transmission of pathogens. Crosby made forceful arguments to support his claim that the most significant consequences of European colonization of the new world were biological in nature.

There is no instant theory or single factor that explains the waxing and waning of towns and cities, and major interpretations of urban change avoid highlighting one static causal factor. But, historically, three Grand Narratives (long-term interpretations) have offered classic accounts of urban development through time, which is, of course, integrally yoked with space. This article begins by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of these models, when applied globally. While none fits all circumstances, their collective insights point to key features within urban history. The second half of the article recombines those central elements into a new and different three fold pattern, again taking an aggregate view of developments over the very long term.

This article discusses the growth of metropolitan cities and city-regions, most notably in the United States, East and South East Asia, and Latin America. The analysis focuses on patterns of social and spatial inequality, the impact of globalization, and the problems of governance and finance of such sprawling, over-extended entities, and the implications for transport and infrastructure.

This chapter examines the development of the international drug control system from its inception in 1909 through to the United Nations General Assembly on Drugs (UNGASS) in 1998. It begins by charting the shifting impact of US campaigns to export its prohibitionist ideology via international legal structures in the foundational years between the Shanghai Opium Commission and the outbreak of the World War II in Europe. US ideals and efforts remained ineffective during the League of Nations decades. The chapter then examines the rapid transformation of drug politics after World War II under the auspices of the United Nations and into the modern era of international drug control. This led to the bedrock of the global drug prohibition regime, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and the modern UN institutions around it. The chapter then traces the development and perpetuation of the international control system since the watershed 1961 treaty until UNGASS 1998.

A product of both world history and contemporary mass culture, culinary tourism is a scholarly field of study that is emerging as an important part of the tourism industry. Also known as gastronomic tourism, tasting tourism, and simply food tourism, culinary tourism refers to adventurous eating, eating out of curiosity, exploring other cultures through food, intentionally participating in the foodways of an Other, and the development of food as a tourist destination and attraction. In culinary tourism, the primary motivation for travel is to experience a specific food. Culinary tourism parallels the globalization of food production and consumption and reflects issues inherent in tourism. It has the potential to address some of the controversial issues in tourism in general, such as questions of authenticity, commodification of tradition, identity construction, intellectual property and intangible heritage, as well as the ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability of food cultures in response to tourism.

Opium is central in the history of nineteenth- to early twentieth-century late imperial and modern China. Opium’s shift from herbal medicine into a larger narco-economy helped shape China’s foreign relations and economic life, affecting Chinese culture and the long struggle for modern China. This chapter puts together researched social history issues of who smoked opium, when, and why. By considering opium as a consumer item, historians “decriminalize” and depoliticize thinking about the drug and its consumption. Opium, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, began to appeal to millions of consumers from different regions and backgrounds as they indigenized, integrated, enhanced, and reinvented opium smoking as something Chinese. The demand for drugs’ rising consumption drove its rising trade, foreign conflicts, prohibition, and modern state “opium regimes.” Drug consumer culture offers a window on how a commodity and its consumption impacted the course of Chinese history.

This chapter focuses on understandings and debates around cyberterrorism as well as the effect particular representations of this phenomenon have upon assessing its threat. The chapter begins by introducing various understandings of cyberterrorism and differentiates between narrow and broad conceptions as well as effects and intent based definitions. Moving on to consider the threat of cyberterrorism the chapter identifies an ongoing debate between “concerned” and “sceptical” voices as well as those that contest whether cyberterrorism has ever taken place. The chapter then introduces a range of broadly constructivist studies which question the orthodox approach to cyberterrorism as an ontological reality and highlight the importance of media representations of this threat. To illustrate this, the chapter concludes by highlighting findings from a recent study of global news media coverage. It shows that this media is frequently apprehensive in tone, despite the existence of diverse understandings of cyberterrorism and cybersecurity.

This chapter, concentrating mainly on Anglophone cultures, examines the emergence and construction of drug use as a social, medical, and legal problem in the late nineteenth century, which was a prelude to their early twentieth-century legal restriction. Growing belief in the concept of “addiction” as an explanation of habitual drug use was central to this transformation and, for many specialists, addiction encompassed the principal social and medical harms born by narcotic drugs such as morphine or cocaine. The emergence of addiction as a medical or disease concept fostered the change from older moralistic models of the habits and harms inflicted by inebriation, those inherited from previous religiously inspired temperance movement anti-alcohol campaigns. It reflected and enhanced the growing power of the medical profession as reformers seized upon new “scientific” justifications for legal restrictions on the use of what became depicted as dangerous drugs.