Abstract This paper will trace the arrival of cocaine in colonial South Asia between 1885 and 1911. It argues that across that period two separate and distinct markets developed, one after the other. The first was a straightforward medical market, the second a more complex one, where the substance was made available beyond anything that resembled a formal medical context, to consumers who had uses for it other than the strictly therapeutic. This market had emerged by the end of the 1890s and endured until the Second World War. The study engages with David Courtwright’s ideas about the nature of ‘limbic capitalism,’ arguing that the sudden arrival of a novel therapeutic in a complex context at this time is the ideal place to see how far those ideas are useful to historians.
Mills (Mon,) studied this question.