Benjamin R. Siegel
Writer and Historian
Associate Professor of History at Boston University
Uncovering the commodity chains that shape our bodies, our politics, and our world.
Uncovering the commodity chains that shape our bodies, our politics, and our world.
Oxford University Press, 2026
The sweeping story of how opium built empires, global capitalism, and the modern opioid crisis.
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Cambridge University Press, 2018
How food lay at the heart of India's postcolonial nation-building project.
Read More ↓I'm a writer and historian who uncovers how the things we consume — food, drugs, and other global commodities — have shaped modern life, from the power of states to the choices on our dinner plates. My work follows the systems behind agriculture, industry, and global trade to explain how empires ended, how markets were built, and how our most basic needs became global industries.
Across two decades of reporting and historical research, I've built a career tracing how global systems reshape the most intimate parts of human life. My previous books examine how commodities build worlds. Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2018), revealed how food lay at the heart of India's postcolonial nation-building project. My forthcoming book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers (Oxford University Press), tells the sweeping story of how opium built empires, global capitalism, and the modern opioid crisis.
I'm now writing a global history of protein — how we produced and came to believe we need more of it, and the far-reaching consequences for our bodies, our politics, and our planet.
My work regularly appears in public-facing venues, and I frequently appear on podcasts and radio programs to discuss the history and politics of food, medicine, and development. I've presented my research to audiences across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, China, Germany, and Switzerland. Trained at Yale and Harvard, I have held fellowships at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies, and have held visiting research positions in India and China.
Literary representation: Sarah Khalil at Calligraph
For other inquiries: Please reach out via email, brsiegel@bu.edu
My writing combines the investigative instincts of my work as a researcher-reporter at Time with rigorous archival research to explore the systems shaping our world.
Oxford University Press, 2026
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 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.
"Siegel turns opium history, a story dominated by prohibitionists and traffickers, into a parable of creative destruction. He shows how a peasant crop that sustained empires devolved into a 'zombie commodity' struggling to survive in a world transformed by capitalism and novel technologies. One puts this original, ambitious, and often surprising book down thinking about much more than opium." —David T. Courtwright, author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
"With a fresh analysis of opium as a global agricultural commodity rather than as a moral object, Markets of Pain reveals how the age of empires lastingly shaped a political economy that delivered too many opioids to some, and not enough to others." —David Herzberg, author of White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America
"From poppy fields to pharmaceutical labs, Siegel's ambitious book shows us how marginalized opium-producing peasants were not just tethered to but were foundational to the modern global pharmaceutical industry. Going beyond pharmaceutical boardrooms and the crisis ravaging American streets, Markets of Pain introduces us to a different drug supply chain. This book is essential reading to understand how the centuries-old, insatiable demand for opium and its derivatives has a longer and broader history." —Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Harvard University
Cambridge University Press, 2018
This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.
"This is that rare book that is historically rooted and complex, yet strikingly contemporary. The issues of hunger and malnutrition continue to be on the agenda of policy makers and society at large in twenty-first-century India. Siegel gives this a complex history and background. Imperial administrators and nationalists, concerned social activists and scholars saw this in different, often contradictory ways. Yet the multiple lenses for viewing hunger, dearth, and public action in the middle of the last century can help with insights into our own times. This is a fine book, one not to be missed." —Mahesh Rangarajan, Ashoka University, India
"Hungry Nation is an elegantly written, compellingly argued, account of the central role played by food and famine in the making of modern India. Through careful archival research spanning different decades since the Great Bengal Famine, Benjamin Robert Siegel takes us further than anyone before him in understanding this important issue. Scholars in a variety of disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, public policy, and public health will find much to admire and debate in these pages." —Akhil Gupta, University of California, Los Angeles
"Both entirely innovative in its approach to politics, and cunning in its summation of the complexity of the transition to postcoloniality, Hungry Nation will find a wide audience amongst scholars of South Asia, late empire, Cold War history, food studies, and environmental history. The value of his intervention is in Siegel's ability to use a deep, thorough reading of specific policy to illuminate a meta-conception of one of the key postcolonial challenges of the era: the responsibility of government to its citizens in the intimate, visceral experience of the sustenance of life through the relationship between food and body." —Rachel Berger, Concordia University, Montreal
"Siegel's book stands out among other works for its rich visual archive of Indian agrarian life … this book should be widely read and debated by scholars interested in the twentieth-century history of postcolonial state making, agrarian transformation, and the politics of transnational developmental expertise." —Debjani Bhattacharyya, Environmental History
"Hungry Nation is an important compilation of empirical material on the evolution of food and agriculture policy within newly independent India … it also represents a significant conceptual contribution, likely to stimulate further lines of scholarly inquiry in studies of India, both historical and contemporary." —Trent Brown, Asian Studies Review
"In the course of this fine book, Siegel refers to a range of disciplines, including agricultural, economic, political, and environmental history … Scholars, advanced students, and general readers interested in the first three decades of the development of modern India will gain much from this valuable volume." —Michael H. Fisher, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History