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Paul Eliot Gootenberg is a historian of Latin America who specializes in the history of the Andean drug trade, the fields of Peruvian and Mexican history, as well as historical sociology. He earned an M. Phil from the University of Oxford and a Ph. D. from the University of Chicago, and is currently a Professor of History and Co-director of Latin American Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been both a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow. Along with the historian Herman Lebovics and the sociologist Daniel Levy, he is a coordinator of the Stony Brook Initiative for Historical Social Sciences.
Gootenberg is the author of Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840-1880, which has been described as having "had a profound impact on Peruvian historiography". Referring to himself as a "recovering economic historian", Gootenberg has centered his scholastic energies on contributing to the crafting of a "new history of drugs" and has published several works in the field. He has also written Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, which Gootenberg describes as "cocaine's first full-length biography". It has received mostly positive reviews, with the historian Arnold Bauer calling it Gootenberg's "most accomplished book to date" and the St. John's University scholar Elaine Carey stating that the book should be considered "an essential work for any scholar or student of the histories of narcotics, Latin America, and economics."
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