Even before the age of offshoring, the narcotics trade was an early standard-bearer of globalization, with prim Victorians enthusiastically trading drugs along with tea and spices as world trade opened up in the nineteenth century. Britain twice went to war with China to keep the international opium trade alive. Meanwhile, Western consumers began to develop a taste for imported narcotics. Charles Dickens was supposedly a fan of opium; in Vienna, Sigmund Freud devoured line after line of cocaine, causing him to write giddy letters to his girlfriend, Martha Bernays
