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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
In this groundbreaking, revisionist work on the history of temperance and prohibition. Schrad makes a compelling case that the temperance movement was not just an American phenomenon but "the most popular, most influential, and longest-lived international social-reform movement in the history of the world" (p. 9) ... This study will go a long way toward reorienting scholars' approach to temperance and prohibition. * J. M. Richards, CHOICE *
Written in a lively style and with arguments presented clearly, if at times rather overemphatically, the book is an engaging and informative read which deserves to be in any serious historical library. * Annemarie McAllister, Culture and Social History *


Awards
Winner of Winner, 2022 Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations, International Studies Association.



Book Information
ISBN 9780190841577
Author Mark Lawrence Schrad
Format Hardback
Page Count 752
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 160mm * 238mm * 60mm