Smashing the Liquor Machine

When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitive global history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical American evangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations of the American west. Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.

Mark Lawrence Schrad is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He is the author of The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. His most recent book: Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (2014) has gone through two editions and has been translated into Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, and Chinese.

- Chapter 1: Introduction-Everything You Know About Prohibition Is Wrong - Part I: The Continental Empires - Chapter 2: Two Tolstoys and a Lenin-Temperance and Prohibition in Russia - Chapter 3: The Temperance Internationale-Social Democrats Against the Liquor Machine in Sweden and Belgium - Chapter 4: Temperance, Liberalism, and Nationalism in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires - Part II: The British Empire - Chapter 5: Temperance and Self-Determination in the British Isles - Chapter 6: Black Man's Burden, White Man's Liquor in Southern Africa - Chapter 7: Gandhi, Indian Nationalism, and Temperance Resistance Against the Raj - Chapter 8: The Dry Man of Europe-Ottoman Prohibition Against British Domination - Part III: The United States - Chapter 9: First Peoples, First Prohibitionists - Chapter 10: Liquor and the Ethnic Cleansing of North America - Chapter 11: "All Great Reforms Go Together"-Temperance and Abolitionism - Chapter 12: The Empire Club Strikes Back - Chapter 13: A Tale of Two Franceses-Temperance and Suffragism in the United States - Chapter 14: The Progressive Soul of American Prohibition - Chapter 15: Prohibition Against American Imperialism - Chapter 16: A People's History of American Prohibition - Chapter 17: Conclusion-Where Did We Go Wrong?