Merchants of Medicines

The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century

Zachary Dorner

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226706801
• eBook ISBN: 9780226706948
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology & Healthcare Industry
• Index: History

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade's dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare.

In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people's expectations of their health and their bodies.

Notes

Introduction

1. Griffenhagen and Bogard, Drug Containers, 75–76; Watters, “Turlington Balsam Phail.”

2. On wood and gunpowder, see Roberts, “Pines, Profits, and Popular Politics”; Cressy, “Saltpetre, State Security.” For the importance of medicines to interimperial competition, see Dorner, “Medicines and Mercantilism.”

3. It is fortunate that some have survived from this period. In one notable case, the journals and ledgers of the English East India Company’s drug trade from 1730 to 1784 were destroyed alongside other “useless records” in 1860 to clear space in India House. Papers Relating to the Destruction of Useless Records (1858–1881), IOR/H/722, pp. 253, 257–59, India Office Records and Private Papers, Archives and Manuscripts, British Library (hereafter cited as India Office Records). For details of Plough Court’s history, see Chapman-Huston and Cripps, Through a City Archway.

4. Commodity studies have become a staple of early modern studies, especially for those who work in a transnational frame. Historiographically, commodities played an important role in organizing early approaches to commodity chains and a world economy. They have been used to write increasingly material histories of empire that link distant places and people, and blend questions of what things meant and what things did across broad geographies and chronologies. The category of commodity has remained capacious, effectively incorporating the human, the environmental, and the manufactured. Commodities have also offered a concrete approach for reevaluating early modern developments, such as the emergence of industrial capitalism or long-distance modernity. For some examples, see Bair, Commodity Chain Research; Pomeranz and Topik, World that Trade Created; Hancock, Oceans of Wine; Norton, Sacred Gifts; Schwartzkopf and Sampeck, Substance and Seduction; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Rappaport, Thirst for Empire; Satia, Empire of Guns; Beckert, Empire of Cotton; DuPlessis, Material Atlantic; Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk; Smith, “Amidst Things.”

5. For a useful overview of this historiography, see Porter, Disease, Medicine, and Society, 40–41. For another perspective on scientific progress, see the essays in Daston and Park, Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3.

6. For example: Winterbottom, “China Root,” 42; Cook and Walker, “Circulation of Medicine”; and especially in the study of Caribbean slavery, such as Paugh, Politics of Reproduction, as discussed in chapter 3. In a twentieth-century context, see Tomes, Remaking the American Patient.

7. How medical practices looked and evolved in a variety of local contexts across this geographical span are stories told by other historians, for example: Gómez, Experiential Caribbean; Sweet, Domingo Álvares.

8. James Delbourgo offers one example of this codependence being made in London through collecting, classifying, and categorizing specimens arriving there, see Delbourgo, Collecting the World.

9. For characterizations of the cotton mill or the iron manufactory as crucibles of industrialization, see Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Satia, Empire of Guns. The term laboratory also reflects period parlance, for example: Inventory and Valuation of Stock, 25 Dec. 1761, MS 5452/2, Corbyn & Co. Papers, Wellcome Library (hereafter cited as Corbyn & Co. MSS). On the topic of laboratories as modern, see Kohler, “Lab History.”

10. Walker, “Remedies from the Carreira da India,” 177–78; Cook and Walker, “Circulation of Medicine,” 339. Eighteenth-century exporters separated drugs from other medicines in the lists they sent to overseas correspondents, see examples in Foreign Letter Book (1742–1755), MS 5442, Corbyn & Co. MSS. The term pharmaceutical has been used as an adjective since the early seventeenth century, but as a noun only since the nineteenth. OED Online, s.v. “pharmaceutical,” March 2018.

11. Wallis, “Exotic Drugs,” 20–22, 26, 34, 36–38; Cook and Walker, “Circulation of Medicine,” 339–40; Rutten, Blue Ships, 11–12; Porter and Porter, “English Drugs Industry,” 279; Roberts, “Import of Drugs into Britain.”

12. Porter, Health for Sale, 40; Berg, Age of Manufactures; Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour.

13. Weisser, Ill Composed, 2–4; Seth, Difference and Disease; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 67; Gómez, Experiential Caribbean, 129; Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves, 12, 123–26. Though scientists today can struggle to chemically isolate an active ingredient from a long-used plant, that does not mean that the medicines made from it were rubbish. Despite the later stigma that premodern medicines often did more harm than good, they were only harmful sometimes; more often, they were palliative and mostly harmless, though rarely curative in our terms. Yet for patients and practitioners, merchants and vendors, many substances had strong bodily effects that “worked” from their perspectives. Winterbottom, “China Root,” 40–41; Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, 7.

14. On biological versus cultural approaches to historicizing taste, see Norton, Sacred Gifts, 7–9; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, esp. chap. 1.

15. For a useful overview of the new history of capitalism, see Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism; Beckert and Desan, American Capitalism; Matson, special issue, Journal of the Early Republic; “Forum: Paper Technologies of Capitalism.” Historians have identified the thick intellectual traffic between the realms of commerce and science in the early modern world: Cook, Matters of Exchange; Margócy, Commercial Visions; Delbourgo, Collecting the World. Less attention, however, has been paid to the economic implications of the confluence of infrastructures of capitalism, empire, and medicine in this period.

16. For these changes, see Brewer, Sinews of Power; Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit; Hancock, Oceans of Wine; Stern, Company-State; Drayton, Nature’s Government. Medicines, however, are typically left to their own literature, for example: Curth, Physick to Pharmacology; Po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• introduction
• one / Toward an Industry
• two / Distance’s Remedies
• three / The Possibility of Unfree Markets
• four / Pine Trees and Profits
• five / Self-Sufficiency in a Bottle
• conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index