Chapter one of Mark Schrad’s new book opens with a gut-wrenching episode of state brutality. It’s 1859 in Spassk, Russia, and the tsar himself has dispatched the military to put down a protest of rebellious serfs. Gen. Yegor Petrovich Tolstoy responds ruthlessly, ordering imprisonment, court-martial, hourslong beatings, running of the gantlet, forced labor, and exile to Siberia for the noncompliant. This violent abuse of serfs in the Russian empire is not surprising, but for modern readers, the motivation for their protest likely is. The act of civil disobedience that brought the wrath of the state upon them was their refusal to drink alcohol.

The incident is smartly chosen by Schrad, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, to startle readers out of their preconceptions about Prohibition. “In Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition,” he seeks to change the way we think about temperance movements by recognizing that they were neither exclusively American nor only the work of rural, white, busybody Protestants. Schrad reveals temperance as a global phenomenon and attempts to reclaim Prohibition, for better or worse, as a fundamentally progressive cause.

Schrad writes not as an advocate for Prohibition nor as a demonizer of drink. He notes in the preface that he composed much of the book with a Manhattan in hand. He aims instead to break down stereotypes of prohibitionists, offering a fuller and more sympathetic view of activists such as notorious hatchet-wielder

“My hypothesis,” Schrad writes, “is that prohibitionism was part of a long-term people’s movement to strengthen international norms in defense of human rights, human dignity, and human equality, against traditional autocratic exploitation. More precisely, temperance advocates held that building the wealth of the state or of moneyed elites upon the misery and addiction of society was no longer appropriate.”

Schrad inverts the contemporary American view of Prohibition as a restriction on individual freedom imposed from above to one in which the least well-off in society struggled from below to liberate themselves from predatory liquor traffic.

The abstinent serfs and the violent response from the Russian state are a striking illustration of this dynamic.

The conflicts detailed in other countries aren’t quite so vivid as forcing peasants to imbibe at gunpoint, but Schrad bolsters his case for recasting alcohol as a tool of oppression with a thorough international survey. Take India, where the British Raj instituted its own system of liquor tax farms, fueling alcoholism while expropriating wealth through its monopoly. Temperance in India was both a fight against drunkenness and for independent nationhood.

In later chapters, Schrad expands the roster of temperance advocates with leading figures from the movements for abolitionism and women’s rights. In this telling, Prohibition was part of a greater unity of progressive causes.

Schrad’s diverse portrayal of the temperance movement is an explicit rebuke of histories that tell the story of Prohibition with an exclusive emphasis on its white advocates. More than that, though, it’s a challenge to the way we typically think about prohibition as an infringement on individual liberty.

This is not, Schrad argues, the way prohibitionists themselves understood their aims. Take William “Pussyfoot” Johnson, one of America’s leading advocates and enforcers of Prohibition. “I am definitely and irrevocably against any law prohibiting a man from taking a drink; or getting soused, for that matter,” he wrote in his post-repeal memoirs. His ire was reserved for the drink seller. “Our laws against selling liquor rest upon exactly the same basis as our laws prohibiting the selling of rotten meat, impure milk, or dangerous drugs,” he wrote in 1930, situating Prohibition with other progressive reforms.

This is a lot to unpack, and at this point in the review, I should reveal my own biases: I’m a libertarian, and I work as a bartender and cocktail writer. I’m a trafficker, you might say. While that might predispose me against this book, I consider it one of the most interesting and informative that I read all year. That’s not to say that its reframing is completely convincing, however.

The challenge inherent to framing Prohibition as more progressive than paternalist is the tension between the noble aim of bettering society and the coercion required to enforce it. Schrad contends that prohibitionists were more concerned with reining in the liquor “traffic” than restricting individuals.

Despite my criticisms, “Smashing the Liquor Machine” is very much worth reading. Schrad’s catalog of alcohol’s harms is a reminder that we should be mindful of its dangers, and his uniquely expansive view of the temperance movement, both within the United States and abroad, is an enlightening corrective to overly simplified accounts. The book’s value lies in challenging preconceptions and asking difficult questions, and it’s to Schrad’s credit that he doesn’t pretend to offer easy answers.