Political Science Professor’s New Book Smashes Stereotypes About Prohibition as an American-Only Phenomenon

VILLANOVA, Pa.—Throughout history, temperance and prohibition have often been viewed as a largely American movement. In a new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine (Oxford University Press, 2021), Mark Lawrence Schrad, PhD, associate professor of Political Science in Villanova University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, offers an international history of alcohol prohibition—redefining it as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the 18th through the early 20th centuries.

Smashing the Liquor Machine offers a wide-ranging, revisionist history of the effort to ban the predatory liquor traffic—and corrects distortions about those who supported Prohibition across the centuries. Historical figures in the book include Black Hawk, Carrie Nation, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, Leo Tolstoy, Theodore Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin and Mahatma Gandhi.

Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.

An expert in the field of international relations and comparative politics, Dr. Schrad is also the author of Vodka Politics: Autocracy and Alcohol in Russia (Oxford University Press, 2014) and The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave (Oxford University Press, 2010). He teaches courses on Russian politics, international law and international organizations. He received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

On Tuesday, Sept. 14 at 5 p.m., Dr. Schrad will give a book talk on Smashing the Liquor Machine in Villanova University’s Falvey Library Speaker’s Corner. The event is free and open to the public. All visitors to campus, regardless of vaccination status, are required to wear masks inside campus buildings.