Speculative Markets

Speculative Markets brings exceptional clarity to a topic of genuine importance-the relationship between transnational finance capital and pharmaceutical supply in West Africa. This is a brilliant multi-sited ethnography of a market, advancing new theoretical understandings of contemporary economic life in Nigeria and beyond. Kristin Peterson also makes a vital contribution to global health and pharmaceutical reasoning by raising critical questions about drug procurement, distribution, and efficacy. -- Julie Livingston, MacArthur Genius Award-winning author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic Speculative Markets changes the way one sees the world. Starting with the contemporary pharmaceutical market in Lagos, Kristin Peterson ultimately narrates a history of the second half of the twentieth century. She makes sense of the massive dispossession in Nigeria without reducing the complexity and range of actors who enable the local circulation of pharmaceuticals, both real and fake. Peterson's ethnographic research and political-economic analysis are phenomenal. -- Joseph Dumit, author of Drugs for Life Peterson's account, which at times personifies this complex history through dialogue and vivid scene setting, does not offer solutions per se but may be instructive in understanding challenges in other countries that rely on informal markets, as well as how global market forces can have a ripple effect. -- Jessica Bylander Health Affairs The account Speculative Markets provides is itself is densely layered, mimicking the story it tells. The tone and approach shifts and turns as Peterson guides us through Idumota's crowded marketplace and through global capital. -- Anne Pollock Medical Anthropology Quarterly Speculative Markets tells a remarkable story of market creation, destruction, and rebuilding. It is a clear-sighted, hard-hitting book, but not a despairing one (it ends, in fact, on a distinctively optimistic note). It is also a book that demonstrates the contribution that ethnographic research can make to our understanding of the lives of pharmaceuticals... -- Javier Lezaun Somatosphere [A] highly-detailed, carefully analyzed and enlightening piece of work, illuminating much of the complexities of African drug markets (and of markets and industries beyond Africa), with insights that will appeal to a broad audience. -- Emilie Cloatre Somatosphere Kristin Peterson's work finds root here and adds fresh perspective to well-worn conversation of drug markets and their machinations. ... This is an important contribution, and it comes during a vital moment in global health. As diverse fields of research and industry continue to work toward equity of health for all, and attention is increasingly oriented forward, it is my hope that Peterson's attention to historical detail can be a tool for thinking about how to proceed. -- Ryan Whitacre Global Public Health Kristin Peterson's new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. ... The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the 'structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood.' It is a timely and fascinating study. -- Carla Nappi New Books in Sociology Peterson suggests that an anthropology of global health might tell us about the transition from state-based production of health to a global one. It elucidates how global economic processes effecting pharmaceuticals have local outcomes, how processes relying on global connections are at work in the making of health. Most importantly she shows how market systems are delivering health care and the effects of these less planned economies on quality and access to pharmaceuticals simultaneously generating uncertainty and capital for those who trade in them. -- Andrew McDowell Biosocieties Speculative Markets is a boldly compelling example of ethnography that is at once thoroughly grounded in extensive fieldwork in one place..., but also situated in a rich and impressive historical narrative and a remarkably comprehensive account of relevant large-scale political-economic forces... Peterson's outstanding book will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists, equally worth reading if one is an Africa specialist or a student of the history of medicine, public health, or global political economy. -- Daniel Jordan Smith Bulletin of the History of Medicine A captivating, beautifully written description of the dynamics of Nigeria's drug industry. -- Olubukola S. Adesina African Studies Quarterly