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  • The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800 by Matthew James Crawford
  • Stefanie Gänger
Matthew James Crawford. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. xi + 284 pp. Ill. $45.00 (9780822944522).

In recent decades a proliferation of scholarship on medicine and botany in the Spanish Empire has not only narrowed what had long been a gap in history of science research, but also altered the contours of that field, traditionally oriented toward the Northern European and Anglo-American worlds. In this spirit, Matthew Crawford’s The Andean Wonder Drug contributes to scholarship on “imperial botany”—the “mutually beneficial relationship[s]” (p. 12) between “plants and empire”—with a study on the “confluence of science and empire” (p. 14) in Spain and Spanish America. Using the example of the bark of the cinchona tree—one of the Atlantic world’s most coveted medicines in the eighteenth century, and an important Spanish American export—Crawford examines the Spanish Crown’s efforts to “wield” science, particularly botany, medicine, and pharmacology, in ways useful to its government and treasury.

Three introductory chapters provide background information on the “making” of cinchona as a medication, and Atlantic commodity, over the late 1600s and 1700s: on the part the Loja region—then the principal harvest site—as a traditional center of Andean healing and epidemiological frontier of the Spanish conquest played in the bark’s “discovery”; on the role private trade, the Atlantic disease environment, and the European medical community had in bringing cinchona to the attention of the Spanish government; and on the function of that empire’s peculiar “epistemic culture” in making natural resources, like cinchona, “intelligible and … amenable to imperial administration” (p. 17).

The focus, and interest, of the book lies in its second part, which examines disputes and struggles over the allocation, and recalibration, of botanical, medical, and pharmacological authority within the Hispanic imperial apparatus, in its quest for reliable counsel on how to exploit the cinchona tree profitably, and lastingly. Chapter 4 examines a debate between the apothecaries pertaining to Madrid’s Royal Pharmacy and informants in the harvest areas—colonial officials and bark collectors—over the quality of different cinchona varieties. Chapter 5 concerns the enlargement of the community of cinchona experts in consequence of that debate—over the 1770s, to physicians and pharmacists of the royal household and the army and, later, to botanists like Casimiro Gómez Ortega and José Celestino Mutis. Chapter 6 focuses on the setbacks experienced by Vicente Olmedo, the “botanist-chemist” appointed codirector of the royal cinchona reserve in Loja in 1790, in his efforts to implement imperial policies. Chapter 7 examines a dispute over competing classifications of cinchona varieties, involving Mutis and Francisco Antonio Zea on one side, and Hipólito Ruiz López and José Pavón on the other, and the part the participants’ close, personal involvement in the imperial order and agenda had in exacerbating their disagreement.

The Andean Wonder Drug is a deft, solidly documented monograph, and anyone with an interest in Iberian “economic botany” is well advised to read it. Its greatest merit lies, perhaps, in its original, and refreshing, conclusion that “European [End Page 133] science faltered as a tool of empire in the late eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic World” (p. 8), with the increasing “intertwining of botany and empire” (p. 112) offering “few, if any, of the practical or economic benefits” (p. 14). In arguing that failure, fragility, and discord—the uncertainty of botanical classification, the inability to enforce imperial standards, or the contingency of naturalist knowledge—were at the roots of the empire’s inability to generate significant profits from plants, the book contributes new detail, and welcome nuance, to a field that has long taken the optimism of European imperial rhetoric about the harnessing of science for granted. The argument would have benefited, and gained in significance, however, from greater emphasis on contextualization or explicit comparison with other empires: for, surely, the reverses, contingency, and ambiguity the Spanish Empire encountered in its endeavor to “wield” science were not entirely unknown to...

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