Exoticizing Consumption: European Drug Cultures, 1670-1740

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. Exoticizing Consumption 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.

E. C. Spary (Editor)
E. C. Spary is Professor in the History of Modern Knowledge at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She is a member of the British Society for the History of Science. Previous positions have included a lectureship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London, and a research professorship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, Germany. Her monographs include Utopia’s Garden (2000), Eating the Enlightenment (2012) and Feeding France (2014), and she has co-edited several collections of essays, including Cultures of Natural History (1996).

Justin Rivest (Editor)
Justin Rivest is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His work has appeared in Early Science and Medicine, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The Canadian Journal of History, Ambix, and the New England Journal of Medicine.