The Dutch-language Yearbook Eighteenth Century has published a special issue on 'Drink & Drugs in The Eighteenth Century', which Stephen Snelders edited, working together with Sarah Adams and Elwin Hofman from Utrecht University.
https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/DAE2024.004.SNEL
Drank en drugs in de achttiende eeuw | Amsterdam University Press Journals Online
Abstract: Although the concept of ‘drugs’ was unknown in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, the consumption of psychoactive substances was part of the diet. Consumption patterns shifted significantly during the century. Alcohol was consumed increasingly in the form of jenever (geneva) and wine rather than beer, snuff tobacco became popular alongside pipe smoking, the popularity of coffee and tea continued to grow and opium was an essential medicine. Criticism and ridiculization of these new consumer fashions grew at the same time as concerns about dependence on them. A distinct and elaborated concept of addiction didn’t exist. The argument of some historians that this eighteenth-century ‘psychoactive revolution’ led to the dissemination of more ‘civilized’ and ‘bourgeois’ modes of behaviour remains questionable.
EU Philosophy of Cosmology
