In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics.

For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and peril, its legacy entangled with addiction, imperialism, and the complex interplay of global trade and national development. While the illicit opium trade is infamous, the history of licit opium--how it was farmed, refined, and used to build modern medicine and shape state power--has remained largely untold.Drawing on archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the United States, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford UP, 2026) traces the global arc of licit opium from poppy fields and processing plants in India, Turkey, and Australia to the clinics and laboratories of modern medicine. It shows how both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic treated the opium poppy as a national resource and a means of securing global stature. In postcolonial India, by contrast, nationalist leaders initially rejected opium's imperial legacy before embracing its strategic value amid the shifting currents of the Cold War. At the heart of this story are the cultivators, scientists, bureaucrats, and policymakers who shaped the licit opium trade and grappled with its far-reaching consequences. Their work and visions demonstrate how colonial empires and postcolonial states helped forge the global pharmaceutical industry as it struggled to govern a drug it could not abandon.Markets of Pain reveals how a seemingly marginal crop became an unlikely engine of modernization, a tool of Cold War geopolitics, and a harbinger of today's global opioid crisis. Blending vivid scenes from opium's fields and factories with incisive analysis of scientific and diplomatic archives, Benjamin Robert Siegel recovers a buried history with urgent relevance for global supply chains, international power, and public health.

Markets of Pain offers an account of the global drug trade in the twentieth century, focusing on the transformation of opium from a colonial commodity into a modern resource for the American and European pharmaceutical industries. Challenging simplistic ideas of licit and illicit drugs in the twentieth century, it reveals how the modern global drug regime was formed by India and Turkey's navigation of the international anti-opium movement, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and the complex relationship between agriculture, medicine, and global capitalism.

The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research agendas, only to eventually fall to the margins again. What explains this cyclical pattern? What are the consequences for our understanding of war?Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies (Oxford UP, 2026) by Dr. Chiara Libiseller examines these questions by likening the coming and going of theories to fashions. While in vogue, fashionable concepts are used widely, becoming broader and vaguer until essentially stripped of meaning. At the same time, they are bestowed with authority and power that allows them to withstand criticism and marginalizes alternative perspectives. These characteristics severely affect the quality, depth, and diversity of research by narrowing and siloing the field of inquiry.Tracing three concepts—revolution in military affairs, counterinsurgency, and hybrid warfare—through their fashion lifecycle, Dr. Libiseller demonstrates how fashionability affects the concepts themselves, related research, and the field more generally. Embedded within a discussion of the history and dynamics of Strategic Studies, the book calls for more reflexivity in the study of war and strategy.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

When it comes to consciousness, William James is well-known for his descriptions of it rather than his theory of it and its relation to the body. In Consciousness is Motor: William James on Mind and Action (Oxford UP, 2025), Alexander Klein elaborates James’ theory of the evolutionary function of consciousness and how conscious states are always linked to the body and always trigger bodily motion (from physiological changes to purposive behavior). Klein, who is Canada Research Chair and Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, describes the vivisection experiments with headless frogs that led theorists to deny that consciousness was necessary for purposive action or to affirm that consciousness depended on the whole nervous system, not just the brain. James instead proposed an essential link between consciousness and purposive action in which the latter required an ability to entertain “absent” (future) sensations. Klein’s book situates James in relation to contemporary debates regarding the functional role of consciousness, the search for neural correlates of and behavioral markers of consciousness, and the embodiment of mind.

In Genesis 9, Noah plants a vineyard, and eventually becomes drunk and uncovered in his tent. Then we are told that Ham sees the nakedness of his father, but when Noah wakes up he curses Canaan, Ham’s son. For more than two thousand years, interpreters have struggled to make sense of this story, trying to fill its gaps and explain its ambiguities.

Tune in as we speak with Justin Michael Reed, who offers a novel explanation in his recent book, The Injustice of Noah's Curse (Oxford UP, 2025)

Justin Michael Reed is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Amongst the many achievements of the Castilian court of King Alfonso X (1221-184) is the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of 429 songs preserved in four manuscripts. In The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court (Oxford UP, 2024) Henry T. Drummon re-examines a subsection of this collection, the cantigas de miragre. These songs set miracle narratives to recursive, refrain-based musical structures. By situating the musical and poetic form of the cantigas de miragre against the backdrop of discourses about rhetoric animating 13th-century intellectual life, Drummond shows how these songs worked to communicate propagandistic messages on behalf of a crown in crisis. Available recordings of the cantigas discussed in the podcast include those from Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI, the Boston Camerata and the Andalusian Orchestra of Fez under the direction of Joel Cohen, and René Clemencic’s Clemencic Consort.