My recent posts on contemporary India and recent changes in licensing laws in
Wales and in England point to some research opportunities.  Remarkably little
has been done for alcohol-related history outside Europe, its onetime settler
colonies, and the British Empire in Africa.  It is not only research in depth
based on archival sources, newspapers in local languages, oral history, etc.
that is lacking.  To the best of my knowledge there is not even for post-1947
India the kind of preliminary survey that could be done by reading English-
language newspapers and India government publications available in London and
Washington, DC.  For the British Isles the twentieth century is largely blank
so far as academic research is concerned, except for a few business historians.
(Not that earlier periods have been exhausted; for instance, there has yet to
be a published survey of the temperance movement in 19th-cent. Scotland.)  And
even for North America, the focus of most academic research, almost nobody
looks at the post-Prohibition era, perhaps a reflection of the reality that
nearly all scholars confine themselves to the organized temperance movement.
 
David Fahey (Miami) [log in to unmask]