The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800

Abstract

Drawing on Atlantic history, the history of science, and commodity studies, this book manages to make a strong original contribution to scholarship on a topic, medicinal cinchona (quina in botanical form), that has drawn its share of general writings over the years. The study's primary concerns, aside from the early Amazonian bark antidote for malarial fevers, are the intersecting “networks” or “politics” of knowledge that swirled around cinchona and between officials, botanists, pharmacists, and Andean protagonists in the trade. These discourses are plucked from consecutive Spanish crown attempts across the long seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to regulate or improve the tree's extraction and quina commerce, centered around the designated royal reserve of cinchona in the eastern Loja forests of today's Ecuador.The Andean Wonder Drug covers such an extended chronology in two well-structured sections: part 1, “Andean, Atlantic, and Imperial Networks of Knowledge,” which explores the seventeenth-century construction of quina as a medicine, commodity, and resource; and part 2, “The Rule of the Local and the Rise of the Botanists,” which explores the high imperial politics of the drug. The introduction lucidly lays out a wider set of issues about the “power” and “fragility” of European science in the Spanish Atlantic world—its “epistemic cultures”—in the strategic cascarilla (or Peruvian bark) commerce.Chapter 1, “Quina as a Medicament from the Andean World,” is an ethnohistorical foray into the meanings of the drug from perspectives of local curanderos or herbalists, such as the Kallawaya of the Bolivian Andes. Chapter 2, “Quina as a Product of the Atlantic World,” lays out a counterpoint in the drug's transformation into an Atlantic commodity—linked to Atlantic slavery and plantation economies—prior to the formation of the royal reserve in 1751. (There were other areas of quina collection, some touched on by Crawford, throughout the eastern Andes ranging from today's Colombia to Bolivia.) Chapter 3, “Quina as a Natural Resource for the Spanish Empire,” looks at the tree from Madrid's mercantilist perspective and its challenges (such as ecological scarcity and adulteration) during the era of official botanical expertise. Together, these three sides beautifully illustrate the historical construction of goods and the multiple meanings of drug products.Part 2 of the book, “The Rule of the Local and the Rise of the Botanists,” goes into fine detail about eighteenth-century debates, mostly concerning management of and improvement projects for the Loja reserve. Chapter 4 covers the divergence of local magistrate Pedro de Valdivieso's management of Loja's forests from 1768 to 1784—and conflicts over quality control—from the position of distant crown pharmacy experts. Chapter 5, “Botanists as the Empire's New Experts in Madrid,” charts the post-1770s reign of Spanish botanists as quina specialists over previously entrenched authorities such as royal physicians and pharmacists. Chapter 6, “Imperial Reform, Local Knowledge, and the Limits of Botany in the Andean World,” traces the impact of reformers on the trade by the 1790s, including European scientific expeditions and powerful botanists like Vicente Olmedo. There was even a failed effort to foster cinchona plantations, in Quito. That, of course, is exactly what the British and Dutch managed to do, with purloined Andean saplings, in successful South Asian plantations a half century later, an act of scientific botanical imperialism that facilitated modern European empires throughout the tropics. This left a “backwards” cast over the longer extractive Spanish quina trade, as well as our curious bitter legacy of quinine water.Any fine book elicits a few gripes. I wanted to know more context in the actual emerging networks or commodity chains of quina and quinine: methods of extraction and processing, merchant shipping routes and practices, and Spanish and wider medicinal usage. Similarly, quinine could have been more deeply analyzed as part of growing debates about the roles of “drugs” in the early modern world. I also yearned for more of that promised Andean knowledge: apart from an early sample of curanderos and Valdivieso's era in Loja we really get little here, which mostly revolves around larger bureaucratic, mercantilist, and regal disputes. How did distant spheres of knowledge articulate and affect each other? By the end, I thus felt a bit lost by a few of the broader assertions about the discursive networks around the plant. An example: “As botanists became integrated into the structures and epistemic culture of empire, they became less able to serve the empire—at least in the way that they promised—because integration meant association with some of the interest groups competing to define what ‘the empire’ was” (p. 175).That said, this is an excellent book on an intriguing and vital topic in both Andean and Atlantic history.