Few commodities have generated such intense regulation or provoked such sustained moral and political debate as alcohol. Yet it rarely appears at the center of narratives on U.S. power. This panel argues that alcohol provides a useful lens for reassessing U.S. global influence in the 20^th century. It treats alcohol as a site where law, empire, military occupation, trade policy, and development strategy converge. The papers examine a question that confronted American reformers, businessmen, soldiers, and government officials alike: who had the authority to regulate consumption? By focusing on struggles over production and distribution, the panel shows that alcohol was far from peripheral to the exercise of U.S. power abroad. It was embedded in the everyday governance of territories, the management of occupied populations, and the expansion of global markets. In this way, the panel addresses broader questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and influence during the American century.

Methodologically, alcohol highlights the entanglement of culture, law, political economy, and diplomacy. Alcohol is uniquely suited to this work because it is simultaneously a commodity, a moral concern, and a marker of identity. Debates over temperance and prohibition were never solely about public health and safety; they were disputes over the boundaries of state authority. Decisions about who could brew, distill, import, or consume alcohol were tied to trade policy and development strategy. Tracing alcohol across borders allows us to track the movement of goods and people alongside legal and commercial expertise. It also directs attention to sites often treated as peripheral, from corporate boardrooms to tourist bars. By placing government and local archives in conversation, and by taking seriously the materiality of intoxicants themselves, the panel reframes U.S. foreign relations as a history of negotiated consumption and contested sovereignty. Alcohol becomes a methodological bridge between cultural/social history and diplomatic history. It shows that global influence was shaped not only through treaties and troop deployments, but through the regulation and circulation of everyday goods.

The four papers demonstrate the breadth of this approach. “Empire on the Rocks” examines the legal and political battle over the 18^th Amendment in the Philippines, the only place under the American flag where alcohol remained legal during Prohibition, showing how Filipino jurists and distillers leveraged ambiguities of the Jones Law to challenge imperial authority. “Brewing Tensions” turns to the U.S. occupation of Germany, where the American-imposed brewing ban (Brauverbot) and the preferential supply of beer to U.S. servicemen exposed the contradictions of military governance and reshaped civil-military relations. “Spirit of the Nation” traces how midcentury distillers secured bourbon’s designation as a distinctive U.S. product and embedded American whiskey within the emerging architecture of postwar trade liberalization. Finally, “Cold Drinks for a Cold War” interprets the rise of the Piña Colada in 1950s Puerto Rico as both artifact and agent of Operation Bootstrap, arguing that rum and tourism helped recast the island as a prosperous bulwark against communism. Together, these papers demonstrate that to study alcohol is to uncover a potent archive of U.S. global influence.