Copyright by Benjamin Patrick Breen 2015
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright by Benjamin Patrick Breen 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Benjamin Patrick Breen certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Tropical Transplantations: Drugs, Nature, and Globalization in the Portuguese and British Empires, 1640-1755 Committee: __________________________________ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Supervisor __________________________________ Julie Hardwick __________________________________ Abena Dove Osseo-Asare __________________________________ Neil Kamil __________________________________ Harold Cook Tropical Transplantations: Drugs, Nature, and Globalization in the Portuguese and British Empires, 1640-1755 by Benjamin Patrick Breen, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Acknowledgements Tis dissertation owes a large debt to the faculty and staff at UT Austin: above all to Jorge Cañizares, for his trademark coupling of shrewd critique and warm encouragement, and to Julie Hardwick for her wise counsel and passion for all things early modern. I wish also to acknowledge James Sidbury, Bruce Hunt, Joan Neuberger, Brian Levack, and Marilyn Lehman. Abena Dove Osseo-Asare provided a well-timed infusion of advice during the late stages of this project, and Harold Cook of Brown University generously offered encouragement and expert knowledge as this dissertation’s external reader. Matthew Childs and James Sweet, while visiting as Insitute of Historical fellows during my first year, helped me to realize that graduate school needn’t necessarily dampen one’s joie de vivre; they also inspired a new interest in African history that I owe to their conversations both in the classroom and at the Crown and Anchor. I want to acknowledge in particular Felipe Cruz, Chrisopher Heaney, Brian Jones, and Cameron Strang for their friendship and kindness over the past seven years. And thanks as well to my other colleagues in UT’s Department of History, which I now realize was a uniquely collegial place to be a graduate student: Mikki Brock, Julia Gossard, Peter Hamilton, Rachel Herrmann, Michael Schmidt, Kyle Shelton, Renata Keller, and Laurie Wood. Likewise to friends outside of the History Department: Alma Trotter, Katherine Noble, Meg Freitag, Dustin Neuman, Andrew Bailey, Meg Rose, Ross Otto, Brian Sullivan, Rachel Berman, and Antonia Frydman. iv Researching and writing this project involved extensive travel, and I have accrued many debts in the process. In Philadelphia, I owe thanks to the compansionship and support of Mairin Odle, Claire Gherini, Matt Goldmark, Ashley Cohen, Sean Trainor, Mitch Fraas, Rebecca Onion, Yves Guyon, Daniel Richter and the staff and community of the McNeil Center. At the John Carter Brown Library, I salute Margot Nishimura, Ken Ward, and my fellow Fiering House residents Ben Reed, Celine Carayon, Julia Gaffield, Sophie Brockmann, and Nate Probasco. At the Huntington, I greatly enjoyed peaceful walks around the gardens in the company of Matt Sargent, Ran Segev, and Claudia Tobin. And in London, I owe a special debt to Patrick, Adam, Béné, Trip, Waddah, Asya, Juan, Seda, and the other residents of Bishops House for inviting me into their home and for countless interesting conversations. In Lisbon, where the bulk of the research for this dissertation took place, Daniela Mak, Stephanie Almeida and Jason Keith Fernandes provided invaluable companionship during a rather solitary period of research. Te Luso-American Development Foundation and the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo provided financial support and a office space early on in my time in Lisbon that helped me get settled. Muitas obrigadas as well to the kindly staff of the Portuguese Fulbright Commission and to the librarians of the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, the Torre do Tombo, the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, and to the employees of the AHU’s café in the rose garden, a true hidden gem. It was also in Lisbon that I met Timothy Walker, whose intellectual generosity and friendship came at just the right time, and whose work has been foundational to this v project. Tanks also to Liam Brockey for some patient paleography help during my very first day in the archives. Te archival research for this project was made possible via the generosity of the J. B. Harley Fellowship in the History of Cartography, the Luso-American Development Foundation, the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Fulbright Commission, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the New York Academy of Medicine, the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the Fellows of Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Te writing up period was sustained by a UT Austin’s William C. Powers Jr. Graduate Fellowship and a Mellon- ACLS-Dissertation Completion Fellowship. To these institutions and to their staff who work to make historical research possible in a difficult period for the humanities, I express my sincere gratitude. I also want to acknowledge the influence of a few outstanding teachers I was lucky to study under prior to graduate school: Steve Henrikson, Ursula Schneider, Jefferson Adams, David Bernstein, and Perry Gauci. My sister Heather has been a reliable source of support over the years. Evenings with her and her partner Miguel have had more of an influence on this work than either of them can know. And moosh bokhoradet to Roya Pakzad, truly a ghul in kindness if not in stature, for making the final months of dissertating far more fun than I could have ever anticipated. Finally, I wish to dedicate this dissertation to my mother Gloria, to my father John and to my little brother Nathan. I will always be grateful to you. vi Tropical Transplantations: Drugs, Nature, and Globalization in the Portuguese and British Empires, 1640-1755 Benjamin Patrick Breen, Ph.D Te University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Prior to the nineteenth century, the boundary between pharmaceuticals used in medicine and recreational intoxicants was blurry. The term “drug” (droga in the Iberian languages) had, in the sixteenth century, signaled anything from tobacco and opium to cinnamon, mercury, and musk. Yet by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the term began to acquire more modern connotations: psychoactive, exotic, potentially illicit, valuable. “Tropical Transplantations” is a study of the early modern drug trade that focuses on the tropical outposts of the Portuguese empire (particularly Amazonia and Angola) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the long-distance trade and transplantation of drug crops influenced not only commerce and empire, but also the construction of scientific knowledge about tropical nature and the emergence of a globalized culture of healing that incorporated Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans. Chapter one examines the roles of the apothecaries and drug merchants who transformed tropical materia medica into compound medicines. Chapter two reassesses bioprospecting in the New World interior by reconstructing the hunt for new drugs in seventeenth-century Amazonia, arguing that the search for tropical remedies was an act not of discovery, but of invention. Chapter three moves from Amazonia to Africa, probing the origins of the feiticeiro or “fetisheer” (African healer/sorcerer) as Atlantic world medical practitioners. Chapter four reconstructs little-known schemes to transplant valuable drugs between the East and West Indies and the British and Iberian colonies. Finally, chapter five establishes the broader import of these findings, showing that the global networks of the tropical drug trade profoundly shaped Enlightenment science and European imperialism. vii TABLE of CONTENTS Figures, Maps, & Tables ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... x Glossary of Terms ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... x A Note on Definitions, Dates, & Spelling .............................................................................................................................................. xi INTRODUCTION. Te drug trade in world history . Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................................... . Historiography and methodology ........................................................................................................ . Chapter outline .......................................................................................................................................................................... CHAPTER . ‘Te Treasury of Drugs Unlock’d’: Apothecaries and Early Modern Globalization . Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................................... . Defining drugs ............................................................................................................................................................................