Conversations on Europe. The Austrian Connection: Internationalism, Empire, and the Interwar Origins of the War on Drugs

This presentation examines the emergence of the global regime of drug prohibition between the two world wars. The transformation of substances such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana from lightly regulated medical products to strictly controlled and generally illicit goods was not, as is often argued, simply an American imposition on the world. Rather, it grew out of the internationalist aspirations of the League of Nations, founded at the conclusion of the First World War in order to create a more moral and peaceful form of global politics. The presentation will show how the League of Nations’ drug control system sprang from competing visions for global transformation in the aftermath of the First World War, including British efforts to revitalize its overseas empire, an Austrian program to build a new postimperial order from the rubble of the Habsburg Monarchy, and an American project to transcend European empire in East Asia.

David Petruccelli completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University and his PhD in history at Yale University in 2015. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, where he is working on his manuscript, “A Scourge of Humanity: International Crime, Law, and Policing in Interwar Europe.” He has published articles in the "Journal of Contemporary History," "Contemporary European History," and "Tr@nsit Online," a web journal of the Institute for the Human Science in Vienna.