Queen Victoria is often remembered as the figurehead of a moral, industrious era in British history. Yet the global economic machinery that operated during her reign included one of the most ...

Victorian mothers regularly dosed their crying babies with opium-containing syrups to help them sleep, workers took laudanum to get through painful shifts, and middle-class women used it to cope with ...

While 1950s parenting practices seem shocking today, Victorian-era child-rearing reached levels of cruelty that modern neuroscience reveals caused catastrophic brain damage. From drugging babies with ...

The opium poppy looks delicate and innocuous. But for Amitav Ghosh, an Indian writer, it is “one of the most powerful beings that humans have encountered in their time on Earth”. Mr Ghosh’s elegant ...