This article outlines the history of the commerce in medicinal plants and plant-based remedies from the Spanish American territories in the eighteenth century. It maps the routes used to transport the plants from Spanish America to Europe and, along the arteries of European commerce, colonialism and proselytism, into societies across the Americas, Asia and Africa. Inquiring into the causes of the global 'spread' of American remedies, it argues that medicinal plants like ipecacuanha, guaiacum, sarsaparilla, jalap root and cinchona moved with relative ease into Parisian medicine chests, Moroccan court pharmacies and Manila dispensaries alike, because of their 'exotic' charisma, the force of centuries-old medical habits, and the increasingly measurable effectiveness of many of these plants by the late eighteenth century. Ultimately and primarily, however, it was because the disease environments of these widely separated places, their medical systems and materia medica had long become entangled by the eighteenth century.
Abstract‘Circulation’ is not only among the most widely used words in the language of global history; it is also among the most erratically employed. Amorphous in its usages and protean in its semantics, ‘circulation’ has come to describe any sort of movement: from circular movement and passage along the vessels of closed systems to, paradoxically, open-ended, unidirectional dissemination. This article asks how ‘circulation’ became prominent metaphorically in global history; it seeks to understand the word’s appeal and the consequences of its ascendancy. It argues that the popularity of ‘circulation’ is attributable to a merger of two of its qualities: its seeming ‘untainted-ness’ and openness, on the one hand, and on the other, how its older, medical and economic, meanings resonate in its usages, allowing it to convey a sense of entity (independent existence) for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of directedness, self-reliance, and ‘liquidity’ for the movements it describes.
This forum explores new directions in global intellectual history, engaging with the methodologies of global and transnational history to move beyond conventional territorial boundaries and master narratives. The papers focus on the period between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, an era in which the growth of cities, burgeoning print cultures and new transport and communications technology enabled the accelerated circulation and exchange of ideas throughout the globe. The proliferation of conferences, world fairs, and international congresses, the growing professionalization and definition of academic disciplines, and the enhanced circulation of scholarly journals and correspondence enabled intellectuals around the world to converse in shared vocabularies. Much of the scholarship on early twentieth-century intellectual history in the non-Western world has been viewed through the binary relationships of metropole and colony, or as nationalist reactions to colonial domination. This cluster widens the framework to consider the way in which intellectuals formed scholarly networks and gathered multiple influences to articulate new visions of community and society within a wider world of ideas. The multiplicity of imperial and transnational pathways allowed not only for “centers of calculation” in colonial metropoles, but also for points of convergence and encounter outside Europe. As these papers show, the routes by which ideas travelled brought forth a global republic of letters, composed of diverse “centers” for the collection and production of knowledge by intellectuals operating in different parts of the world.
In 1899, Chilean workers discovered the mummified body of a woman in a copper mine in Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert. Chile's most prominent archaeologists were called to examine the body and they estimated it had been in the mine for more than four centuries. What most astonished both the public and the scholarly community was that the body had been preserved virtually intact, apparently by nothing but the environmental conditions surrounding it. José Toribio Medina, a central figure in Chilean archaeology at the time, discussed this finding in 1901: Natural causes account for the mummy of Chuquicamata. The body is that of a female. The depth of the soil where the corpse was found was no more than six to eight feet, and the miner was probably searching the mountain when a sudden collapse buried her. The miner, feeling that the mountain was breaking down, lifted her arms up to protect her head, the position in which her body is preserved. … In some parts of the body, especially the arms, the difference between the injured and the intact parts of the skin can even be distinguished, to the point where it seems almost that blood is flowing from the wounds. In her face, hidden between her arms, her contracted mouth is visible… .1
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