Editors: Emma C. Spary (University of Cambridge) & Justin Rivest (Kenyon College)
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
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.
The book 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.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Troubling Exotic – Emma C. Spary & Justin Rivest
1. The Unexotic World: Medical Drugs, Global Exchanges, and Moscow’s View of the Foreign, ca. 1690 –Clare Griffin
2. Galenic Bodies and Jesuit Beans: Consuming Drugs in Manila at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century – Sebastian Kroupa
3. Theriac as a Domestication Technology: The Indigenous and the Exotic in Galenic Pharmacy – Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore
4. Competing Medical Substances during an Epidemic: Causes and Consequences ofthe Interference of Peruvian Bark and Cascarilla, 1720-1740 – Wouter Klein
5. The Medical Reception of Sassafras in Early Modern English Print – Katrina Maydom
6. Accumulation of the Exotic in the Palestra pharmaceutica (Madrid, 1706) of Félix Palacios – Paula De Vos
7. A Science of Things: The Jesuits and the Introduction of American Materia Medica in Europe – Samir Boumediene
8. Masters of the Exotic? The Stocklists of Parisian Grocers and Apothecaries, 1650-1730 – Emma C. Spary
9. Consuming the Exotic in Eighteenth-Century Switzerland: Laurent Garcin’s “Maduran Pills” – Alexandra Cook
10. Mercurius in the Storehouse: The Exotic in the Here and Now of Early Modern European Experience – Hjalmar Fors
Notes
Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources
List of Contributors
Index