Abstract
Reviewed by: Jennifer L. Anderson, Stony Brook University (SUNY), New York, USA
Beginning in the sixteenth century, malaria was introduced to New Spain with devastating results, especially for Amerindians with no prior immunities. This mosquito-borne illness, characterized by recurrent fevers, spread rapidly throughout the greater Atlantic region, along with the expanding transatlantic slave trade and plantation complex. Matthew Crawford’s fascinating new book The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800 examines how the Spanish Crown sought to retain control over supplies and proprietary knowledge of the famed cinchona bark (also known as Jesuit’s Bark), the most effective drug available at the time for treating malarial-induced fevers. As Crawford recounts in Part I, indigenous Andean healers initially drew on their traditional knowledge of medicine and ethnobotany to utilize the bark of the native cinchona tree as an antifebrile. As word of its medicinal properties circulated, growing demand for the life-saving bark (from which quinine was later isolated) gave rise to some notorious attempts at botanical espionage as English, Dutch, and French governments sought to secure the bark or, better yet, to transplant the tree itself.
Consequently, the Spanish closely guarded cinchona supplies, restricted outsiders’ access to the Peruvian forests where the trees grew, and tried to limit the circulation of information about their sources. This approach was consistent with the Spanish Crown’s long-standing mercantilist policies during the early modern period that sought to monopolize valuable ‘New World’ commodities and preferred a mantle of secrecy to retain useful commercial knowledge. However, as historians Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Antonio Barrera have demonstrated, the Spanish Empire was also committed to supporting the pursuit of new scientific knowledge, influenced by some of the same Enlightenment currents as elsewhere in Europe. The tensions between these perspectives – scientific and commercial –influenced the epistemic understanding of cinchona bark and ultimately reshaped its production and the market for it.
While previous studies have examined the integration of cinchona into European materia medica and early efforts to secure it from New Spain, often by various modes of subterfuge, their focus has mainly been on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Part II, Crawford extends his analysis into new territory, considering how the cinchona trade was transformed in the eighteenth century, during the period of the Bourbon reforms. By then, the growing scarcity of the precious trees, along with problems with contraband and adulterated supplies, necessitated intensive new management policies. Crawford centres his discussion on a critical turning point in 1751 when the Spanish Crown created a royal forest reserve in the main cinchona-producing region, with an eye towards protecting the remaining trees and ensuring a continued supply of this valuable resource for Spanish subjects. His emphasis on conservation in the service of empire recalls Richard Grove’s influential Green Imperialism, which focused on Europeans’ emergent environmental ethos, that, although economically motivated, sought to counter the degradation and depletion of natural resources in colonial settings.
Crawford offers an intriguing case study of how the Royal Pharmacy in Spain sought to standardize production of cinchona bark from afar, with the goal of improving its quality, efficacy and purity through scientific study. When their experiments proved ineffectual, they dispatched highly-trained botanists and chemists to Peru to apply their scientific knowledge more directly to manage the Peruvian forests, oversee quality control of bark harvesting, instruct workers on best methods, and seek out other potentially valuable species. These experts were dependent, in turn, on the local knowledge of creole merchants and indigenous labourers, who derived their livelihoods from finding, collecting and selling the bark. The interests of these parties, whether in Peru or in Spain, were not always aligned, however, leading to intense contestation over how bark was evaluated, classified and graded.
Despite the determination of the Spanish Crown, the Royal Pharmacy and their appointed representatives to assert authority and control over cinchona supplies through applied scientific knowledge, they were thwarted at every turn by the competing interests of colonial elites who were more interested in short-term gains. Ultimately, Crawford concludes that ‘early modern European science was not only far from hegemonic but also was, at times, impotent in the face of the heterogeneous social, cultural, and natural worlds that comprised European empires’ (12).
In this compact volume, Crawford brings together a remarkable array of primary sources, including many previously overlooked late eighteenth-century materials. In the process, he reveals how traditional Andean healers, labourers who harvested the bark, elite creole merchants, European explorers and travellers, Royal pharmacists, scientists and medical practitioners – through their various perspectives and specialized knowledge – all contributed to the epistemic understanding of cinchona. Crawford’s extensive bibliography could serve as an excellent primer on the history of science, medicine and natural philosophy in the Spanish Empire. By focusing on the intense competitions, intrigues, and failures that characterized the drive to control the American ‘wonder drug’, Crawford compellingly illuminates the interconnections, as well as the fault lines, among science, commerce, and empire.