Humans have altered their mental and physical states using naturally-occurring compounds for all of recorded history. But it was not until the sixteenth century that the trade in medicinal and recreational drugs became truly global in scope, bringing substances which once had regional or hemispheric cultures of usage onto a world stage. It was also in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the drug trade became tied up with the colonial enterprises of the great European powers—first the Portuguese and Spanish, and then the Dutch, French, and British. This article will summarize some of the key characteristics of the drug trade in the early modern period (c. 1500 to 1800), with a focus on the circulation of drugs within the British empire.
By the second half of the late seventeenth century, British natural philosophers and physicians had come to see the drug trade both as a critical tool of empire and an important element in what historians would later call the Scientific Revolution. When the natural philosopher Robert Boyle set down his “desiderata” of phenomena that he hoped savants would discover in the future, his thoughts turned to drugs. Boyle speculated about the discovery of “potent Druggs to alter or exalt imagination, waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease paine, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, &c.” Another entry made it clear that Boyle’s musings were based upon Europe's recent encounters with new stimulants and intoxicants from across the seas, including a by‐now‐familiar Chinese leaf: “Freedom from Necessity of much sleeping, exemplify'd by the Operations of Tea.”
The interest of Boyle and the other early members of the Royal Society in substances that altered mind or body was not just theoretical. Tea, after all, had appeared in London within living memory, first circulating as an exotic medicament in the 1650s, then becoming a fashionable recreational stimulant following the arrival in London of the Portuguese princess Catarina as the consort of King Charles II. Her dowry included both chests of drugs and spices, and a humble Indian fishing village which would later become a massive metropolis thanks, in large part, to the riches that Britain amassed from the drug trade: Mumbai. The trade in drugs had by this time become a lucrative business—but it was also a risky one. John Jacob Berlu's The treasury of drugs unlock’d. Or a full and true description of all sorts of drugs, and chymical preparations, sold by druggists (1690) offers an especially vivid glimpse into the life and thought process of an early modern drug merchant.
Among the drugs in Berlu’s treasury was a specific type of human skull, which appears in his book under the Latin name Cranium Humanum. “The Scull of a Man," Berlu advises morbidly, “ought to be of such an one which dieth a violent Death (as War, or Criminal Exuction) and never buried: Therefore those of Ireland are here best esteemed.”
The emphasis on unitary drugs, or “simples,” in texts like Berlu’s can be misleading. From the perspective of both patients and practitioners, simples were usually constituent parts of remarkably complex “compound drug” recipes. These recipes tended to combine familiar elements of pharmacy, like opium, with substances from much further afield, like the powdered body parts of rare tropical animals, pulverized precious gems and metals, or even products made from human remains such as mumia or cranium humanum.
François Monginot’s popular treatise on cinchona bark (also known as Jesuit’s bark), which was translated into English in 1681 under the title A new mystery in physick discovered, is mostly known today for its advocacy of cinchona in the treatment of fevers. But Monginot didn’t prescribe cinchona bark alone. His recipes were far more elaborate than that. Here is one representative example:
Take of the Extract of the Peruvian Bark, made with the accuated Spirit of Wine, three ounces, of the extract of Centaury made with the same Menstruum, one ounce, of the Extract of the Opium, prepared after the same manne[r], one Dram, of the tincture of Coral one ounce, of prepar’d Allum six drams, of the Saccharum Satuani [cf. Aubrey’s Sacc. Saturn.] two drams, of the Diaphoretick of Antimony ten drams, of the Sal Armoniack eight drams, of the Essence of Vipers ten drams, of the Tincture of Gold one ounce.
Even after mixing this baroque assemblage of substances, further steps awaited the early modern drug-preparer, requiring the use of expensive (and easily breakable) alchemical vessels.
The early modern drug trade’s reliance on compound medicines had multiple rationales. From a theoretical perspective, practitioners of humoral medicine often thought of an effective drug in terms of its ability to treat a lack of order within the body’s internal constituents. If the compound medicine was not carefully balanced by numerous complimentary drugs to mitigate the powerful simples within it, then the drug risked further destabilizing the humors of the patient. However, it did not go unnoticed by critics of early modern apothecaries that the vogue for complex compound remedies also made it easier to perform a bait and switch on their customers. Berlu, for instance, advised his readers that he was writing his Treasury of Drugs as a public service, so that they might avoid the tricks of druggists and apothecaries who misled buyers about the origin, purity, quality, or even identity of the drugs they sold. Alluding to the widespread fears of Catholic conspirators in 1680s London, Berlu wrote that he hoped drug sellers would abandon “that Popish Tenet, To keep the People in Ignorance,” and conclude that “the more Men understand the Goodness of a Commodity, the more Value they will set upon it.”
As with other early modern trades, there was a sharp gender division of labor in the early modern drug trade. Since mixing, distilling, decocting, fermenting, grinding, and all the other physical labors involved with drug preparation were often considered to fall under the heading of household labor, much of this work was performed women, including the daughters and wives of licensed apothecaries. But published accounts of drug preparation – and legal and financial authority over the drugs and shops themselves—were overwhelmingly dominated by men.
The early modern drug trade relied not just on the participation of European merchants and medical professionals, but on the labor, often coerced, of drug experts from Africa, Asia, and the indigenous Americas. This did not go unnoted even in the accounts of elite natural philosophers. Robert Boyle encouraged the adoption of “physick… [from] the Indians and other barbarous Nations” as well as from “Midwives, Barbers, [and] Old Women” because, he speculated, “where the Practitioners of Physick are altogether illiterate, there oftentimes Specifics, may be best met with.”
Today, in a world of drug stores, drug dealers, and drug companies, it is easy to forget that the drug trade of the early modern era was the common point of origin of all three. A critical tool of colonial violence and imperial conquest as well as a significant part of the Scientific Revolution and the changing social order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, early modern drugs had important impacts that are still being felt today.
Further readings
Bian, He. Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Cook, Harold J., and Timothy D. Walker. “Circulation of Medicine in the early modern Atlantic world." Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (2013): 337–351.
Dorner, Zachary. "'No one here knows half so much of this matter as yourself': The Deployment of Expertise in Silvester Gardiner's Surgical, Druggist, and Land Speculation Networks, 1734–83." William & Mary Quarterly 72, no. 2 (2015): 287–322.
Dorner, Zachary. Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Wallis, Patrick. “Exotic Drugs and English Medicine: England's Drug Trade, c.1550–c.1800,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 1 (February 2012): 20–46.