73. From Birdcrap to Blow: The Intellectual Journey of Paul Gootenberg
New York trip report
Dear Readers,
Last week I was in New York City/Long Island to fête the great Paul Gootenberg, who just retired after more than thirty years as a professor of history at Stony Brook University.
Paul is a huge figure in drug history and has done more to globalize our field than pretty much anyone else. He refused to take that compliment when I offered it last week, but I think most drug historians would agree with me. Here’s Paul’s most recent contribution on that front:
There are 36 essays in that volume from around the world. We’ve come a long way, and Paul Gootenberg has had a lot to do with it.
Paul began his career as an economic historian of Latin America, especially Peru. His first book, From Silver to Guano, described Peru’s transition from its colonial era, which was dominated by silver mining, to an early national period dominated by guano exports.
Guano is of course birdshit. And in the nineteenth century there were massive mountains of it on the islands along Peru’s coast. Here’s a picture of a Peruvian guano “mine” from the 1860s:
Now that’s a serious pile of shit, people!!
Well all of that shit made for really good fertilizer, which made guano an incredibly valuable commodity for nineteenth-century Peru. Indeed, one of the primary obstacles to economic development in nineteenth-century Latin America was getting goods to market from the interior. Massive mountain chains, huge deserts, and a dearth of navigable rivers made it difficult to profitably get most commodities to the industrializing world (at least until the railroad became widespread at the end of the century).
These huge piles of crap along Peru’s coast solved this little dilemma for Peru since you could literally maneuver a ship right up to a massive turd mountain and just shovel the shit on board! Thus starting in the 1840s, Peru began to pull itself out of its post-independence economic doldrums, decades before many other Latin American nations would be able to do so.
After two books on Peru’s guano era, Paul got interested in cocaine, which was a major, and still very legal, Peruvian export of the late nineteenth century.
So naturally Paul decided that this little retirement symposium celebrating his long, successful, and very prolific career should be called, “From Birdcrap to Blow: Paul Gootenberg’s Intellectual Journey 1985 to 2024."
Obviously, Paul has a great sense of humor, so the event was part roast, part scholarly symposium. Here’s me roasting Paul at the start of my talk (that’s the historian Pablo Piccato to Paul’s left):
It was a lot of fun.
If you’ve got access to a good library, you should check out the Handbook of Global Drug History (it’s a little pricey otherwise). If you just want to get a taste of Paul’s work, here’s a piece we wrote together: “Toward a New Drug History of Latin America.” I’m also quite fond of this one on the “Pre-Colombian” era of drug trafficking, but it’s behind a paywall unless you’ve got access to an academic library.
In any case, New York was terrific. I did four great new interviews for the podcast while I was there, which I need to edit and publish.
Which reminds me that I’ve got a lot of work on my plate today, so I’ll leave this here.
Happy retirement, Paul!