Paul Gootenberg

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Paul Eliot Gootenberg is a historian of Latin America who specializes in the history of the Andean drug trade, the fields of Peruvian and Mexican history, as well as historical sociology. He earned an M. Phil from the University of Oxford (1981) and a Ph. D. from the University of Chicago (1985), and is currently a Professor of History and Co-director of Latin American Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. [1] He has been both a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow. [2] [3] Along with the historian Herman Lebovics and the sociologist Daniel Levy, he is a coordinator of the Stony Brook Initiative for Historical Social Sciences. [4]

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Gootenberg is the author of Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840-1880, which has been described as having "had a profound impact on Peruvian historiography". [5] Referring to himself as a "recovering economic historian", [2] Gootenberg has centered his scholastic energies on contributing to the crafting of a "new history of drugs" [6] and has published several works in the field. He has also written Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, which Gootenberg describes as "cocaine's first full-length biography". [2] It has received mostly positive reviews, with the historian Arnold Bauer calling it Gootenberg's "most accomplished book to date" [7] and the St. John's University scholar Elaine Carey stating that the book should be considered "an essential work for any scholar or student of the histories of narcotics, Latin America, and economics." [8]

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Cocaine Strong stimulant used as a recreational drug

Cocaine, also known as coke, is a strong stimulant most frequently used as a recreational drug. It is commonly snorted, inhaled as smoke, or dissolved and injected into a vein. Mental effects may include an intense feeling of happiness, sexual arousal, loss of contact with reality, or agitation. Physical symptoms may include a fast heart rate, sweating, and large pupils. High doses can result in very high blood pressure or body temperature. Effects begin within seconds to minutes of use and last between five and ninety minutes. Cocaine has a small number of accepted medical uses, such as numbing and decreasing bleeding during nasal surgery.

The history of Peru spans 10 millennia, extending back through several stages of cultural development in the mountain region and the lakes. Peru was home to the Norte Chico civilization, the oldest civilization in the Americas and one of the six oldest in the world, and to the Inca Empire, the largest and most advanced state in pre-Columbian America. It was conquered by the Spanish Empire in the 16th century, which established a Viceroyalty with jurisdiction over most of its South American domains. The nation declared independence from Spain in 1821, but consolidated only after the Battle of Ayacucho three years later.

Economy of Peru

The economy of Peru is an upper middle income economy as classified by the World Bank and is the 47th largest in the world by total GDP. Peru was one of the world's fastest-growing economies in 2012, with a GDP growth rate of 6.3%. As of 2018 the GDP growth rate has slowed to 3.99%. It currently has a high human development index of 0.741 and per capita GDP above $12,000 by PPP.

Economic history

Economic history is the academic study of economies or economic events of the past. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the application of economic theory to historical situations and institutions. The field can encompass a wide variety of topics, including equality, finance, technology, labor, and business. It emphasizes historicizing the economy itself, analyzing it as a dynamic force and attempting to provide insights into the way it is structured and conceived.

Coca Group of plant varieties cultivated for coca production

Coca is any of the four cultivated plants in the family Erythroxylaceae, native to western South America. Coca is known for its psychoactive alkaloid, cocaine.

Peru Country in South America

Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pacific Ocean. Peru is a megadiverse country with habitats ranging from the arid plains of the Pacific coastal region in the west to the peaks of the Andes mountains vertically extending from the north to the southeast of the country to the tropical Amazon Basin rainforest in the east with the Amazon river. At 1.28 million km2, Peru is the 19th largest country in the world, and the third largest in South America.

Illegal drug trade Global black market

The illegal drug trade or drug trafficking is a global, black market dedicated to the cultivation, manufacture, distribution and sale of drugs that are subject to drug prohibition. Most jurisdictions prohibit trade, except under license, of many types of drugs through the use of drug prohibition laws.

Coca eradication

Coca eradication is a strategy promoted by the United States government starting in 1961 as part of its "War on Drugs" to eliminate the cultivation of coca, a plant whose leaves are not only traditionally used by indigenous cultures but also, in modern society, in the manufacture of cocaine. The strategy was adopted in place of running educational campaigns against drug usage. The prohibitionist strategy is being pursued in the coca-growing regions of Colombia, Peru, and formerly Bolivia, where it is highly controversial because of its environmental, health and socioeconomic impact. Furthermore, indigenous cultures living in the Altiplano, such as the Aymaras, use the coca leaf in many of their cultural traditions, notably for its medicinal qualities in alleviating the feeling of hunger, fatigue and headaches symptomatic of altitude sicknesses. The growers of coca are named Cocaleros and part of the coca production for traditional use is legal in Peru, Bolivia and Chile.

Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.

The balloon effect is an often-cited criticism of United States drug policy. The name draws an analogy between efforts to eradicate the production of illegal drugs in South American countries and the phenomenon of the same name when a latex balloon is squeezed: The air is moved, but does not disappear, instead moving into another area of less resistance.

A drug policy is the policy, usually of a government, regarding the control and regulation of psychoactive substances, particularly those that are addictive or cause physical and mental dependence. Governments try to combat drug addiction or dependence with policies that address both the demand and supply of drugs, as well as policies that mitigate the harms of drug use, and for medical treatment. Demand reduction measures include voluntary treatment, rehabilitation, substitution therapy, overdose management, alternatives to incarceration for drug related minor offenses, medical prescription of drugs, awareness campaigns, community social services, and support for families. Supply side reduction involves measures such as enacting foreign policy aimed at eradicating the international cultivation of plants used to make drugs and interception of drug trafficking, fines for drug offenses, incarceration for persons convicted for drug offenses. Policies that help mitigate drug use include needle syringe programs and drug substitution programs, and free facilities for testing a drug's purity.

John Henry Coatsworth is an American historian of Latin America and the former provost of Columbia University. From 2012 until June 30, 2019, Coatsworth served as Columbia provost. From 2007 until February 2012 Coatsworth was the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and served concurrently as interim provost beginning in 2011. Coatsworth is a scholar of Latin American economic, social and international history, with an emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

The Unidad Móvil Policial para Áreas Rurales (UMOPAR),, was created in 1987 as a subsidiary of the Special Anti-narcotics Force of the Bolivian National Police and it is a Bolivian counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency force which was founded by, and is funded, advised, equipped, and trained by the United States government as part of its "War on Drugs".

Leslie Michael Bethell is an English historian and university professor, who specialises in the study of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America, focusing on Brazil in particular. He received both his Bachelor of Arts and Doctorate in History at the University of London. He is Emeritus Professor of Latin American History, University of London and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, University of Oxford. Bethell has served as Visiting Professor at the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Chicago, the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, the University of São Paulo and most recently the Brazil Institute, King's College London from 2011 to 2017. He has been associated with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for many years, most recently as Senior Scholar of the Brazil Institute from 2010 to 2015. He was a Fellow of St Antony's College and founding director of the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford from 1997 to 2007. He was Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Latin American History in the University of London from 1966 to 1992 and Director of the University of London Institute of Latin American Studies from 1987 to 1992.

Nils Peter Jacobsen is an American historian specializing in the history of Peru. He is an Associate Professor of History and Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jacobsen's work has focused on the area of comparative rural history, the general history of the Andes region, as well as the social and economic history of Peru. He also served as a Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780-1930 and Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation was entitled "Landtenure and Society in the Peruvian Altiplano: Azangaro Province, 1770-1920".

Conference on Latin American History, (CLAH), founded in 1926, is the professional organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association. It publishes the journal The Hispanic American Historical Review.

Historiography of Colonial Spanish America

The historiography of colonial Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history. It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire, and Latin American-born Spaniards' (creoles') search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically-engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of Mexico and Peru, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton. At the turn of the twentieth century, scholarly research on Spanish America saw the creation of college courses dealing with the region, the systematic training of professional historians in the field, and the founding of the first specialized journal, Hispanic American Historical Review. For most of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Spanish America read and were familiar with a large canon of work. With the expansion of the field in the late twentieth century, there has been the establishment of new subfields, the founding of new journals, and the proliferation of monographs, anthologies, and articles for increasingly specialized practitioners and readerships. The Conference on Latin American History, the organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association, awards a number of prizes for publications, with works on early Latin American history well represented. The Latin American Studies Association has a section devoted to scholarship on the colonial era.

Latin American economy

Latin America as a region has multiple nation-states, with varying levels of economic complexity. The Latin American economy is an export-based economy consisting of individual countries in the geographical regions of North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. The socioeconomic patterns of what is now called Latin America were set in the colonial era when the region was controlled by the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Up until independence in the early nineteenth century, colonial Latin American regional economies thrived and worked things out. Many parts of the region had favorable factor endowments of deposits of precious metals, mainly silver, or tropical climatic conditions and locations near coasts that allowed for the development of cane sugar plantations. In the nineteenth century following independence, many economies of Latin America declined. In the late nineteenth century, much of Latin America was integrated into the world economy as an exporter of commodities. Foreign capital investment, construction of infrastructure, such as railroads, growth in the labor sector with immigration from abroad, strengthening of institutions, and expansion of education aided industrial growth and economic expansion. A number of regions have thriving economies, but "poverty and inequality have been deeply rooted in Latin American societies since the early colonial era."

Organized crime in Peru refers to the transnational, national, and local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals who engage in illegal activity in the country, including drug trafficking organizations, terrorism, and attempted murder.

Environmental history of Latin America

The environmental history of Latin America has become the focus of a number of scholars, starting in the later years of the twentieth century. But historians earlier than that recognized that the environment played a major role in the region's history. Environmental history more generally has developed as a specialized, yet broad and diverse field. According to one assessment of the field, scholars have mainly been concerned with "three categories of research: colonialism, capitalism, and conservation" and the analysis focuses on narratives of environmental decline. There are several currents within the field. One examines humans within particular ecosystems; another concerns humans’ cultural relationship with nature; and environmental politics and policy. General topics that scholars examine are forestry and deforestation; rural landscapes, especially agro-export industries and ranching; conservation of the environment through protected zones, such as parks and preserves; water issues including irrigation, drought, flooding and its control through dams, urban water supply, use, and waste water. The field often classifies research by geographically, temporally, and thematically. Much of the environmental history of Latin America focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there is a growing body of research on the first three centuries (1500-1800) of European impact. As the field established itself as a more defined academic pursuit, the journal Environmental History was founded in 1996, as a joint venture of the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA) formed in 2004. Standard reference works for Latin American now include a section on environmental history.

References

  1. "Paul Gootenberg". State University of New York at Stony Brook website. Archived from the original on May 7, 2011. Retrieved May 6, 2011.
  2. 1 2 3 Gootenberg, Paul (June 26, 2009). "Cocaine's first full-length biography". Rorotoko. Archived from the original on May 8, 2011. Retrieved May 8, 2011.
  3. "Fellows Finder - Paul Gootenberg". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved May 11, 2011.
  4. "Initiative for Historical Social Sciences". State University of New York, Stony Brook website. Archived from the original on May 8, 2011. Retrieved May 7, 2011.
  5. Drinot, Paolo (2009). "Review: Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug". Social History. 35 (3): 341–342. JSTOR   27866666.
  6. Uribe-Uran, Victor M. (October 2009). "Political Economy & Globalization". The Americas. 66 (2): 299–301. doi:10.1353/tam.0.0199. ProQuest   209593362.
  7. Bauer, Arnold J. (Winter 2008). "Tracking Cocaine" (PDF). A Contracorriente. 7 (2): 370–375. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 6, 2016.
  8. Carey, Elaine (April 2011). "Cocaine's Rise and Fall: A New Global History". H-net Reviews. Retrieved May 10, 2011.