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Product Description In this unprecedented account of the dynamics of Nigeria's pharmaceutical markets, Kristin Peterson connects multinational drug company policies, oil concerns, Nigerian political and economic transitions, the circulation of pharmaceuticals in the Global South, Wall Street machinations, and the needs and aspirations of individual Nigerians. Studying the pharmaceutical market in Lagos, Nigeria, she places local market social norms and credit and pricing practices in the broader context of regional, transnational, and global financial capital. Peterson explains how a significant and formerly profitable African pharmaceutical market collapsed in the face of U.S. monetary policies and neoliberal economic reforms, and she illuminates the relation between that collapse and the American turn to speculative capital during the 1980s. In the process, she reveals the mutual constitution of financial speculation in the drug industry and the structural adjustment plans that the IMF imposed on African nations. Her book is a sobering ethnographic analysis of the effects of speculation and "development" as they reverberate across markets and continents, and play out in everyday interpersonal transactions of the Lagos pharmaceutical market. Review “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 Published On: 2015-05-27 “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 Published On: 2015-09-10 “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 deliverin