Altered States: Cannabis, Opiates, and the Politics of State Formation in the Late Ottoman and Interwar Eastern Mediterranean, 1876–1937

Abstract

“Altered States” examines the end of empire and the emergence of the state system in the Eastern Mediterranean through a connected and comparative history of drug trafficking, consumption, and regulation. Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, imperial collapse, colonial occupation, and nation-state formation transformed this region from an interconnected Ottoman system into a patchwork of newly established polities. As Ottoman rule gave way to European colonialism and nationalist sovereignty, narcotics grew deeply embedded in the emerging states, economies, and societies of the region. Cannabis, opium, and their myriad derivatives flowed furtively from Anatolia to Egypt, connecting Turkish poppy farmers, Greek hashish smugglers, Armenian opium merchants, Indian café owners, Egyptian consumers, Ottoman officials, and British bureaucrats in a dense web of sale and suppression. This dissertation argues that drug trafficking both undermined and underpinned the transition from empire to nation in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its first section follows the illicit cannabis trade from 1876 to 1929, showing how criminalization sustained inherited imperial networks of commerce and sociability that undermined regional state-making from below. Prohibition did not simply suppress inherited practices of cultivation, circulation, and consumption but reconfigured them into a regional informal economy that operated alongside—and often through—formal markets and state institutions. Within this broader informal economy, an informant economy assigned material value to knowledge of illicit commerce and drew state agents and drug traffickers into overlapping relationships of profit, protection, and policing. Criminalization thus brought state formation into everyday life by recasting established practices of commerce, circulation, and conviviality as illicit while creating new institutions and incentives for their control. Its second section turns to the rise of opiates from 1929 to 1937, showing how the regulation and suppression of narcotics underpinned state-building from above. While Turkey captured the commercial value of opiate production, Egypt confronted many of its social and medical costs, presenting the two states with a shared problem but divergent political and economic possibilities. By fusing concerns over public health and political economy into a discourse of “anti-narcotic nationalism,” Egyptian elites and Turkish technocrats transformed drug control into an instrument for expanding state institutions, asserting economic sovereignty, and defining the boundaries of national belonging. In the process, they recast smugglers, minority merchants, and foreign intermediaries as threats to the health of the national subject and the wealth of the national economy. “Altered States” draws on a diverse source base to construct this narrative. It juxtaposes official records gathered from archives and libraries across Egypt, Turkey, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States with periodicals, memoirs, folk ballads, political cartoons, and other forms of regional popular media. Together, these sources illuminate both authorities’ efforts to control narcotics and the ways that ordinary people navigated, contested, and sometimes co-opted the institutions designed to regulate them. Seen through these intersecting perspectives, the illicit narcotics trade emerges as an important arena for both the making and unmaking of the modern state. This dissertation reveals how drug trafficking produced altered states—both psychoactive and political—that reconfigured regional governance, economic life, and national identity during the tumultuous transition from empire to nation in the Eastern Mediterranean.