192 Book Reviews: Early Modern

Matthew James Crawford. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Sci-
ence in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800. xi + 284 pp., illus., tables, bibl., index. Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. $45 (cloth).

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 ideologi-
cally 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.
Crawford shatters the Spanish Black Legend. The Andean Wonder Drug fully brings to light a Spanish
Empire that was constitutionally far more tolerant of epistemic diversity than, say, the British, largely because
the former never developed the simpleminded discourse of scientific “objectivity” as modernity that the latter
did. There were many other ways of living the Enlightenment than those the historiography narrowly peddles.
The book centers on a mystery that has puzzled historians of Imperial Spain for generations. After
having invested massively in botanical research over the course of the eighteenth century, the Bourbon
Crown had little to show in the way of concrete, positive economic results. The Andean Wonder Drug
seeks to explain some of the causes of these failures by exploring one specific case: the Crown’s involve-
ment in the production and distribution of cinchona bark (quinine), one of the most important febrifuge
drugs available in a world beset by contagious disease and malaria.
Trade in cinchona bark had long been controlled by private interests. Merchants would advance
markup commodities to local laborers who, in turn, would collect the bark from Andean forests to pay
off their debts. The merchants would then bring the bark back to Spain or sell it to British and French
smugglers in Portobello, Panama. The quality of the bark, however, varied wildly. Producers and merchants
agreed that the quality of bark was highly uneven, depending on the species of the tree, the part of the tree
exploited, and the region where the tree grew. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a
consensus emerged among apothecaries and physicians that the trees of Loja (in southern Ecuador) yielded
the best bark. Unsurprisingly, most producers and merchants promptly and misleadingly claimed their bark
to be from Loja. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Crown set out to gain greater control over the
production and distribution of the bark to guarantee a reliable, high-quality supply to hand out as gifts of
charity and patronage. Crawford explores several archives on both sides of the Atlantic to reconstruct how
the Crown sought to establish control over the production and distribution of the Andean wonder drug.
The Crown first sent administrators in the 1750s to confirm that the bark was not tampered with by
corrupt officials and merchants. Despite the best efforts of Crown bureaucrats, however, royal apothecar-
ies would complain that the quality of the bark changed with every shipment. In the 1770s the Crown
turned to the expertise of botanists, on the assumption that the variability was caused by ignorance rather
than corruption, as had originally been thought. Yet even after botanists and naturalists took over, the
Crown kept getting shipments of allegedly unreliable quality. Science proved ineffectual to settle the issue
of whose quina was best. The book offers a counter to the triumphant narrative of science and empire that
dominates the historiography on the Enlightenment. In the case of quina, science did not solve anything;
it actually compounded the problem. Crawford breaks sharply with the growing historiographical consen-
sus that science was a handmaiden of empire.
Crawford offers a tantalizing and novel interpretation of the connections between bureaucracy and
knowledge in the Spanish monarchy: the Crown constantly reached out to all parties, who often held
Isis—Volume 108, Number 1, March 2017 193

antithetical views, in order to adjudicate among them. This was part of the constitution of the empire
itself. This procedure made empire long lasting but also ineffectual. The case of quina highlights the
tensions of the system and the way science worked. Crawford reconstructs the views of all parties involved
(local healers, collectors, merchants, administrators, apothecaries, physicians, botanists, and chemists).
Various physicians and apothecaries got different results and in consequence promoted different types
of bark; different corregidores, visitadores, and viceroys put forth contrasting policy solutions that favored
either the Crown or local merchant interests; botanists classified the plant in many different ways, favoring
rival merchant groups in different regions of the Americas.
Crawford’s illuminating analysis shows that science and knowledge never worked as an outside, ad-
judicating arbiter. In the global Spanish monarchy, science tended not to develop within academies,
museums, and salons (although there were plenty of those too) but as part of the bureaucratic contest. The
record of science and knowledge in the Spanish monarchy has remained invisible because it lies buried
in hundreds of thousands of unpublished mundane bureaucratic records, accumulating dust in archives.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at
Austin. His books include How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford, 2001), Puritan Conquis-
tadors (Stanford, 2006), and Nature, Empire, and Nation (Stanford, 2007).

Susannah Gibson. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Dis-

rupted the Natural Order. xv + 215 pp., figs., notes, bibl., index. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015. £16.99 (cloth).

With ease, clarity, and humor, the historian of science Susannah Gibson has transformed her doctoral re-
search on the nature and meaning of life into a popular account of Enlightenment science that is engross-
ing and thoroughly enjoyable. Gibson guides her nonspecialist readers through eighteenth-century natural
history with personal memories, anecdotes, individual biographies, and detailed histories. Using examples
of eighteenth-century experiments and weird and wonderful creatures like polyps, Gibson reminds us that
modern-day questions about life can be traced back in time not just to the eighteenth century but to Aristotle.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order is split
into six key chapters. The first sets the eighteenth-century context for the volume by examining changing
approaches to the broad question of how to distinguish between animals, vegetables, and minerals. The
eighteenth century was an exciting time: Europeans were exploring the globe, and the period saw an
increasing interest in rational pursuits, an influx of natural material into European cities, improved print-
ing techniques, and the development of scientific instruments like the microscope, as well as important
astronomical observations being made.
In this spirit of Enlightenment, naturalists were rediscovering ancient texts and once again became
fascinated with philosophical questions about the meaning of life and the definitions of natural kingdoms.
The three chapters that follow seek to distinguish these natural kingdoms, and it becomes clear that
throughout history they have been confused, the lines separating them easily blurred.
The beginning of each chapter piques the reader’s interest with an unusual case study that allows Gib-
son to reflect on eighteenth-century natural history more broadly. The chapter on the animal kingdom,
for example, begins with a childhood memory of rock pools in Cornwall. In this case it is the appearance
of sea sponges that highlight the problems of distinguishing between plants and animals. In the eighteenth
century, the resulting experiments became part of popular culture, and Gibson is able to outline clearly
the importance of theories such as materialism and vitalism during this period.
For the vegetable kingdom, it is the story of the Swedish natural historian Carl Linnaeus and his
botanical classification system that highlights how naturalists dealt with questions about generation and