Exoticizing Consumption: European Drug Cultures, 1670-1740 - Hardcover

by E. C. Spary (Editor), Justin Rivest (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

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 the author of Utopia's Garden, Eating the Enlightenment, and Feeding France, and the coeditor of several collections of essays, including Cultures of Natural History.