Overview

Exotic drugs and spices, from tea to opium, were among the first fruits of European commercial expansion in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth, many had become profitable products of the European empires that had spread across the globe. Often, they were objects of appropriation—substances whose curative virtues were known to Indigenous peoples and assimilated into European knowledge and commerce by missionaries, soldiers, and merchants. Exoticizing Consumption explores the many ways in which new global drugs disrupted the European medical marketplace, how they came to be known, described, valued, and used in Europe, how they reached European markets, who sold them, and who consumed them. Individual chapters covering many parts of Europe, from Spain in the south to Russia in the north, address the effects of commercial expansion when no central, national, or international system for policing drugs existed. Collectively, they trace the movement of drugs from their sources of extraction all over the world in light of intertwined processes of knowing, healing, using, and selling in the global marketplace and beyond.

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9780822948704

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Reviews

Exoticizing Consumption is a landmark contribution to the global history of medicine. From Russian rhubarb to Maduran pills, and from Jesuit beans to Parisian stock lists, the essays gathered here insist that drugs are not just material substances but complex cultural artifacts whose meanings were forged at the intersection of empire, commerce, and embodiment. Deeply archival yet conceptually ambitious, Exoticizing Consumption will become a vital resource for scholars of early modern science, medicine, culture, and the global drug trade.--Benjamin Breen, University of California, Santa Cruz Spary and Rivest bring together a fascinating collection of essays from leading historians of medicine. Contributors explore the contested meanings and contingent trajectories of materia medica in and beyond Europe. This excellent and timely book adds nuance to the story of how exotic drugs transformed early modern European tastes and ideas.--Anna Winterbottom, McGill University

Author Information

E. C. Spary (Editor) E. C. Spary is professor in the history of modern knowledge at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She is the author of Utopia's Garden, Eating the Enlightenment, and Feeding France, and the coeditor of several collections of essays, including Cultures of Natural History. Justin Rivest (Editor) Justin Rivest is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. His work has appeared in Early Science and Medicine, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The Canadian Journal of History, Ambix, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

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