BU Historian Benjamin R. Siegel’s Markets of Pain Charts Opium from a Commodity in Colonial India to Fuel for a Drug Crisis in Modern-day America

  • By: Shannon Landis
Photo: Benjamin R. Siegel, a Boston University historian, posing in a suit jacket and striped dress shirt in front of colorful bookshelves for a headshot
Benjamin R. Siegel says the most evocative moment in his research on the opium trade was when he talked with the farmers in central India “whose entire livelihoods were tied up in the crop.” Photo courtesy of Oxford University Press

The rare earths so essential to our modern technology have become a new diplomatic weapon—used to leverage influence and wield power, reshape global alliances, and exert economic dominance. For centuries, says Boston University historian Benjamin R. Siegel, opium was used in much the same way.

In his new book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford University Press, 2026), Siegel “shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics,” according to his publisher. Like the rare earth elements used in phone screens and electric car batteries, legal opium—the raw ingredient in many opioid painkillers—was a tool that could be wielded for societal benefit, but that also gave nations an opportunity to control supply chains and bend the world to their advantage…

To read more, visit THE BRINK where this article originally appeared on April 29, 2026.

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