Graduate Student Bios

Andrew Bellamy is a fourth-year PhD student trained in modern European and global history. His dissertation, "Defying Gravity: The Namazi Family and the Persian Opium Trade in the Age of Prohibition," is a study of the trade in Persian opium during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He tells this story by reconstructing the history and the many worlds of the Namazi family, a diasporic Persian family that monopolized both the legal and illegal trades in Persian opium across Asia. In doing so, he seeks both to understand how and why opium merchants were able to conduct such a sprawling and visible trade against the current of imperial and international prerogatives and to illuminate the economic, legal, and moral tensions that characterized state-merchant relations after the global turn against opium. He received his B.A. and M.A. in History from Baylor University. His work has been featured in The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Historical Research, and Britain and the World.