The Andean Wonder Drug

The Andean Wonder Drug is a welcome addition to the literature on quina, the bark from the cin chona tree. Quina is the natural source of quinine, an invaluable drug used to reduce fevers, especially those associated with malaria. Matthew James Crawford’s work adds substantially to the epistemic location of quina within the Atlantic world by describing the tortured efforts of Bourbon officials to acquire both scientific knowledge and commercial gains from the drug.

The Andean Wonder Drug boldly challenges historiographical consensus. The book offers an alternative to the facile narrative connecting science to empire. It shows that an empire that invested inordinate amounts of resources in botanical expeditions and clinical trials was not necessarily effective at increasing agricul tural productivity. Unlike “scientists” in the British and Dutch Empires, who came to be seen as ideologically detached from the social and political contexts in which their practices were embedded, “scientists” in the Spanish Empire did not enjoy any greater cultural epistemic authority than did other social actors. Bark collectors, local healers, merchants, and bureaucrats wielded as much epistemic power as did leading court physicians, metropolitan naturalists, and worldly chemists. In fact, Matthew Crawford’s book shows that the Enlightenment scientists became bark collectors, merchants, bureaucrats, and policy advisors themselves. By untangling the “epistemic culture” of the early modern Spanish global monarchy, Crawford offers a sweeping counternarrative to any simplified account of the rise of scientific modernity as a tool of empire.

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…. [This] is an excellent book on an intriguing and vital topic in both Andean and Atlantic history.

Although initially described as a comprehensive history of quina, an Andean medicinal bark employed in the early modern period to treat malarial fevers, The Andean Wonder Drug is much more than that. Indeed, Matthew James Crawford uses the history of quina’s discovery as a highly effective febrifuge, its commodification as an export, its vulnerability as an over-exploited natural resource, and its status as a focus of imperial policy to question the relationship between science, empire, and nature in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic World…. Crawford’s study is a fascinating, multi-sited critique of imperial science in the Spanish Atlantic World.

Excellently thought out and clearly written. An excellent book.

Crawford's scholarly study adds to our knowledge of the history of cinchona and of the Enlightenment, but probably its greatest contribution is to document in detail the relationship between science and empire through showing how knowledge was actually acquired and disseminated on the ground within specific economic and political contexts. It is a model for future studies of this kind and a significant contribution to understanding the nature of early modern science.

The Andean Wonder Drug is a deft, solidly documented monograph, and anyone with an interest in Iberian "economy botany" is well advised to read it.

Boldly challenges historiographical consensus. Crawford offers a sweeping counternarrative to any simplified account of the rise of scientific modernity as a tool of empire . . . Crawford's illuminating analysis shows that science and knowledge never worked as an outside, adjudicating arbiter.

This book is an impressive contribution to existing scholarship on early modern science and medicine. It enhances our understanding of the acquisition and circulation of knowledge and is a valuable component of the ongoing discussion regarding the effectiveness of European science as a tool of empire.