Poppies, Politics, and Power engages with the “special place” of opium in the history of Afghanistan in the twentieth century (p. 1). Opium from Afghanistan emerges as a raw product of the highest quality, a “cheap but potent” “cash crop,” and a globally sought-after commodity of significant economic and medicinal relevance (pp. 3, 210). The discussion builds on the tension emerging from opium's gradations of legality as a “licit and illicit” drug (p. 43). The narrative centers on the Afghan state's interactions with the regulatory demands of international orders, on the one hand, and those involved in opium farming, production, and distribution, on the other. Opium is thus woven into diplomatic and political histories of Afghanistan as “part of a larger story about political power, state-development, diplomacy, and even health care” (p. 2). Three intensifying trajectories combine in this book: first, an ever-growing global market for high-quality opium from Afghanistan since the late nineteenth century; second, an ever-forming Afghan state as analyzed through legislation relating to the cultivation, sale, and trade of opium; and third, an ever-present international involvement in “developing” Afghanistan in return for often partial compliance with opium regulation. The contradictory and seemingly counterintentional alignment of outcomes appear as an “irony” in the “Afghan drama” (pp. 217, 1). In this sense, the thriving poppies of Helmand could also be read as “reminders of a vision of modernity gone awry” for Afghanistan as a whole (p. 213).

The introduction lays out the book's main argument, framing the “flourishing opium trade” as “a critical component of the historical process of state formation, social resistance, and fragmentation in the region” (p. 8). The regulation (and often prohibition) of opium production became a “tool” in the state's efforts to extend its control and raise revenue. By the same token, this process prompted evasion and even resistance. In pursuit of elusive political stability, successive rulers and governments of Afghanistan sought external sources of money, leading to international financial dependence(s) and their linked agendas. Bradford argues that “opium's emergence in the illicit market occurs not as a by-product of lawlessness, statelessness, and war but as a consequence of the conflict surrounding the process of state formation in Afghanistan during the twentieth century” (p. 6). Chapter 1 is a brief history of opium from the Mughals onward. The analysis introduces Abdur Rahman Khan (r. 1880–1901) as the amir who “began the process of building an Afghan state in 1880” (p. 27). At this time, the growth of opium led to a shift toward increasing international control of the drug among imperial powers. Amanullah Khan (r. 1919–1929), Abdur Rahman Khan's grandson, prohibited its consumption at home but used international markets to finance important social and political reforms associated with the country's independence after 1919. The book hints at opium's vital role in funding the reclamation of sovereignty from empire in 1919 and the following years—an empire, arguably, itself built on opium and the intoxication of people.

Chapter 2 discusses drug control regimes in the first half of the twentieth century and Afghanistan's attempts to both protect revenue streams abroad and shield the legitimacy of the “modernizing” state at home. Afghan opium had global relevance economically and medically by virtue of its importance for modern pharmaceutical analgesics, such as codeine and morphine. Chapter 3 shows the “coercive” prohibition of opium production in Badakhshan in 1958 in compliance with the 1953 United Nations Opium Protocol, when Afghanistan pushed to become only the “eighth licit producer of opium in the world” (pp. 98–99). International “licit-ness,” however, exacerbated the domestic politics of ethnicity, making the Afghan state “increasingly contentious” and “undermin[ing] the broader goals of Afghan governance” (p. 114–15). Chapter 4 expands on the “early globalization of the Afghan drug trade,” including sections on hashish and tourism in the context of “the infamous ‘Hippie Trail’” as well as “smuggling” to Iran and beyond (pp. 143, 133, 139). Chapter 5 centers Afghanistan in “both the expanding global drug trade and the global war being waged to stop it” at the time of the Nixon administration's “War on Drugs” (pp. 160, 145). Chapter 6, spanning 1946 to 1979, uses as a case study the Helmand Valley Development Project, which turned Afghanistan into “the largest producer of opium in the world and a shining example of the failures of nation building, narcotics control, and American diplomacy with Afghanistan” (p. 179). Whether this happened “inevitably,” however, is a question directly linked to the teleological hegemonies of empire and the nation-state (p. 179). The very important periods between the Soviet and NATO-led invasions of 1979 and 2001, respectively, are treated tangentially, but the epilogue provides an important coda.

Afghanistan, a country often considered to exist as a geopolitical “periphery” (see Benjamin D. Hopkins, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State [2020]) clearly is a center in a global history of opium production, refinement, and consumption. The tropes of Afghanistan as “failing,” “failed,” or “forming”—in other words, “non-West” or “not-quite-yet-West”—still powerfully shape historiographical modes of analysis. In this book, the labeling of Afghan opium as “illicit” directly echoes the terminology of the U.S. Department of Defense (pp. 2, 217). But Bradford makes clear that opium also “embodied an image of modernity, transformation, and growth” (p. 2). In multiple places, important chiffres pierce hegemonic readings of Afghanistan and opium, hinting at the constructed, relational, and shifting meanings of opium's (il)legality over time. For instance, opium is more than an insurgency-fueling “unique security threat”; it is a source of livelihood for “poor farmers” and is culturally embedded (pp. 217, 218; chap. 3). Not least, “one man's smuggler is another man's trader” (p. 42).

Poppies, Politics, and Power sits alongside recent scholarship on independent Afghanistan (e.g., Faiz Ahmed, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires [2017]). Readers will benefit from also tapping into a body of scholarship that has critically engaged with the making of modern Afghanistan in the imperial imagination (e.g., Martin J. Bayly, Taming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808–1878 [2016]; Benjamin D. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan [2008]; Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan [2016]). Bradford's book raises a pressing question, namely “what the history of drugs in Afghanistan can teach us about the drug trade and drug policy in Afghanistan today” (p. 219). Yet it can yield only partial answers from within a frame that prioritizes “the formation of the Afghan state” and its actions in “stopping” or “perpetuating” “the illicit drug trade” (p. 220). In order to fully bring out “cyclical nature” of Afghanistan's global entanglements—and to move beyond permutations of a narrative in which the state of Afghanistan is often “less than” or “not quite” (see Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge [2020])—we must inquire into the hegemonic ambitions of global governance itself, its imperial legacies and strong colonial moorings (p. 219). Problematizing the solutions implemented to address the clearly intriguing and complex history of this particular intoxicant is a promising starting point.