Benjamin Breen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1422005 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Breen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Breen |
| SIGNATURE | BREEN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0518-0226 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Natural leaders: Strategies and barriers for environmental leadership development in diverse young adults
Young adults with marginalized identities are practicing innovative environmental leadership strategies which can inform the evolution of environmental education. This study employs interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and participatory template analysis to describe environmental leadership development experiences of 10 undergraduates with marginalized identities in Arizona, USA. Participants described social and economic exclusion, per…
New Imperial Drug Trades, 1500–1800
It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that drug trades became truly global in scope, and drugs items of everyday sociability. This chapter draws connections between regional cultures of healing, drug cultivation, and new forms of consumption; and the larger cultural, socioeconomic, and medical impacts of drugs in the early modern era. It argues that the globalization of drugs like coffee, tea, cinchona, opium, and tobacco shape…
“That Vast Quantity of Laudanum I Have Been Known to Take”
An impostor who claimed to be a refugee from Formosa (present-day Taiwan) named George Psalmanazar (1679?–1763) embodied two key aspects of addiction in eighteenth-century Europe: its connections to globalization and imperialism, and the complex interplay between the concept of “positive” addictions (such as addiction to study, devotion, or duty) and the growing attention paid to “negative” ones (addiction to superstition, sexuality, or intoxicat…
Where There's Smoke, There's Fire: Pyric Technologies and African Pipes in the Early Modern World
The globalization of pipes and smoking in the early modern world is often thought of as a linear movement from the Americas to Africa and Eurasia. While this is true of tobacco smoking, other early modern cultures of smoking (such as the use of cannabis pipes) diffused from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, not from the Americas. This article traces the technological, linguistic, and cultural translations of smoking in the seventeenth and eighte…
The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World
This article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective. Early modern intoxicants were not disaggregated, free-floating commodities. …
Essays on Some Maladies of Angola by José Pinto de Azeredo
Reviewed by: Essays on Some Maladies of Angola by José Pinto de Azeredo Benjamin Breen José Pinto de Azeredo, Essays on Some Maladies of Angola. Stewart Lloyd-Jones, trans., Timothy D. Walker, ed. Dartmouth, Mass.: Tagus Press, 2016. x + 151 Ill. $40.00 ( 978-1-933227-69-6). Early modern physicians loved lists: lists of authorities consulted, patrons and prescriptions, miraculous cures, and contented patients. Yet the most telling list to appear …
Drugs and early modernity
For centuries, medicinal and recreational drugs have evoked both utopian visions and darker themes: slavish obsession, physical dependency, altered mental states, and the feedback loop of labor and consumption. This article surveys recent work on the history of drugs from the 15th through 19th centuries, arguing that these works collectively demonstrate the importance of drugs and the drug trade in how we think about larger topics such as imperia…
The Encyclopaedia of Liars and Deceivers
No Man Is an Island: Early Modern Globalization, Knowledge Networks, and George Psalmanazar’s Formosa
The 1600-1800 period was an era of global travel and encounters. Yet this “early modern globalization” was highly unstable, characterized by miscommunications and doubts regarding the credibility of both individual witnesses and the facts they adduced. The Formosan hoax of George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763) offers a unique perspective on these themes. Although Psalmanazar was a fraud, his inventions about the island of Formosa circulated widely in d…
Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World
Fundamental features of the early modern Atlantic – like the slave trade, the rise of experimental science and long‐distance commerce, and the proliferation of religious confessions – were transnational in character. This essay surveys recent work in the field, emphasizing emerging scholarship on the hybrid nature of the Atlantic world. Yet for hybridity to work as a useful analytical category, we need to do away with the narrative of “Northweste…
Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World
Fundamental features of the early modern Atlantic – like the slave trade, the rise of experimental science and long‐distance commerce, and the proliferation of religious confessions – were transnational in character. This essay surveys recent work in the field, emphasizing emerging scholarship on the hybrid nature of the Atlantic world. Yet for hybridity to work as a useful analytical category, we need to do away with the narrative of “Northweste…
The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World
This article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective. Early modern intoxicants were not disaggregated, free-floating commodities. …
No Man Is an Island: Early Modern Globalization, Knowledge Networks, and George Psalmanazar’s Formosa
The 1600-1800 period was an era of global travel and encounters. Yet this “early modern globalization” was highly unstable, characterized by miscommunications and doubts regarding the credibility of both individual witnesses and the facts they adduced. The Formosan hoax of George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763) offers a unique perspective on these themes. Although Psalmanazar was a fraud, his inventions about the island of Formosa circulated widely in d…
Drugs and early modernity
For centuries, medicinal and recreational drugs have evoked both utopian visions and darker themes: slavish obsession, physical dependency, altered mental states, and the feedback loop of labor and consumption. This article surveys recent work on the history of drugs from the 15th through 19th centuries, arguing that these works collectively demonstrate the importance of drugs and the drug trade in how we think about larger topics such as imperia…
No Man Is an Island: Early Modern Globalization, Knowledge Networks, and George Psalmanazar’s Formosa
The 1600-1800 period was an era of global travel and encounters. Yet this “early modern globalization” was highly unstable, characterized by miscommunications and doubts regarding the credibility of both individual witnesses and the facts they adduced. The Formosan hoax of George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763) offers a unique perspective on these themes. Although Psalmanazar was a fraud, his inventions about the island of Formosa circulated widely in d…
Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World
Fundamental features of the early modern Atlantic – like the slave trade, the rise of experimental science and long‐distance commerce, and the proliferation of religious confessions – were transnational in character. This essay surveys recent work in the field, emphasizing emerging scholarship on the hybrid nature of the Atlantic world. Yet for hybridity to work as a useful analytical category, we need to do away with the narrative of “Northweste…
The Encyclopaedia of Liars and Deceivers
Essays on Some Maladies of Angola by José Pinto de Azeredo
Reviewed by: Essays on Some Maladies of Angola by José Pinto de Azeredo Benjamin Breen José Pinto de Azeredo, Essays on Some Maladies of Angola. Stewart Lloyd-Jones, trans., Timothy D. Walker, ed. Dartmouth, Mass.: Tagus Press, 2016. x + 151 Ill. $40.00 ( 978-1-933227-69-6). Early modern physicians loved lists: lists of authorities consulted, patrons and prescriptions, miraculous cures, and contented patients. Yet the most telling list to appear …
Drugs and early modernity
For centuries, medicinal and recreational drugs have evoked both utopian visions and darker themes: slavish obsession, physical dependency, altered mental states, and the feedback loop of labor and consumption. This article surveys recent work on the history of drugs from the 15th through 19th centuries, arguing that these works collectively demonstrate the importance of drugs and the drug trade in how we think about larger topics such as imperia…
The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World
This article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective. Early modern intoxicants were not disaggregated, free-floating commodities. …
New Imperial Drug Trades, 1500–1800
It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that drug trades became truly global in scope, and drugs items of everyday sociability. This chapter draws connections between regional cultures of healing, drug cultivation, and new forms of consumption; and the larger cultural, socioeconomic, and medical impacts of drugs in the early modern era. It argues that the globalization of drugs like coffee, tea, cinchona, opium, and tobacco shape…
“That Vast Quantity of Laudanum I Have Been Known to Take”
An impostor who claimed to be a refugee from Formosa (present-day Taiwan) named George Psalmanazar (1679?–1763) embodied two key aspects of addiction in eighteenth-century Europe: its connections to globalization and imperialism, and the complex interplay between the concept of “positive” addictions (such as addiction to study, devotion, or duty) and the growing attention paid to “negative” ones (addiction to superstition, sexuality, or intoxicat…
Where There's Smoke, There's Fire: Pyric Technologies and African Pipes in the Early Modern World
The globalization of pipes and smoking in the early modern world is often thought of as a linear movement from the Americas to Africa and Eurasia. While this is true of tobacco smoking, other early modern cultures of smoking (such as the use of cannabis pipes) diffused from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, not from the Americas. This article traces the technological, linguistic, and cultural translations of smoking in the seventeenth and eighte…
Natural leaders: Strategies and barriers for environmental leadership development in diverse young adults
Young adults with marginalized identities are practicing innovative environmental leadership strategies which can inform the evolution of environmental education. This study employs interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and participatory template analysis to describe environmental leadership development experiences of 10 undergraduates with marginalized identities in Arizona, USA. Participants described social and economic exclusion, per…
Colonialism, slavery, and trade (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · History (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Globalization (4 works) · History (4 works) · Geography (3 works)