Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:34:25.944Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Chelsea to Savannah: Medicines and Mercantilism in the Atlantic World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2019

Zachary Dorner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In 1732, the London Society of Apothecaries joined the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America in a scheme to establish an experimental garden in the nascent colony. This garden was designed to benefit the trustees’ bottom line, as well as to provide much-needed drugs to British apothecaries at a time of increasing overseas warfare and the mortality it entailed. The effort to grow medicinal plants in Georgia drew together a group of partners who began to recognize the economic potential of botany, and of medicinal plants specifically, in calculations of political economy. The plan depended on the knowledge production occurring at the apothecaries’ Chelsea Physic Garden and their efforts to adapt to a changing medicine trade by finding customers among state-sponsored institutions. Taken together, the histories of the gardens at Chelsea and Savannah illustrate that a perceived need for medicines brought plants into expressions of state power long before the network of botanical stations emblematic of the nineteenth-century empire. This earlier transatlantic story pairs the commercialization of health-care provision with shifts in imperial policy in the long eighteenth century.

Type
Original Manuscript
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 28 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 John Pine, [Trustee's Garden Depiction,] 1732, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries. On Pine's career, see Susan Sloman, s.v., “Pine, John (1690–1756),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22293; Coleman, Kenneth, Colonial Georgia: A History (New York, 1976), 17Google Scholar.

2 For example, see Martyn, Benjamin, Reasons for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, With Regard to the Trade of Great Britain (London, 1733), 4–5Google Scholar; Martyn, Benjamin, An Impartial Inquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia (London, 1741), 13Google Scholar.

3 On 20 July 1732, three months after their charter had been signed by King George II, the trustees organized themselves as a corporate body to oversee the colony's economy and began to solicit funding. According to Georgia's charter, no trustee could own land, hold office, or gain any income from the new colony. Trustees also would not receive dividends from anticipated profits, so the colony would have to be funded through charitable donations until it became self-sufficient. The fund for “Encouraging and Improving Agriculture” soon attracted subscriptions from a number of high-ranking aristocrats and powerful men, including Charles DuBois (treasurer of the East India Company), Charles Lennox (the second Duke of Richmond), Sir Hans Sloane (president of the Royal Society), James Stanley (the tenth Earl of Derby), and George Heathcote (a director of the South Sea Company), who saw the economic and political potential of the colony's ecology. Ready, Milton, “The Georgia Concept: An Eighteenth Century Experiment in Colonization,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 157–72Google Scholar, at 164–66; Coleman, Colonial Georgia, 17–18, 112; Allen D. Candler et al., eds., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 39 vols. to date (Atlanta, 1904–), 1:72, 217, 260.

4 Martyn, Reasons for Establishing, 27; Oglethorpe, James Edward, A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia (London, 1732), 20–21Google Scholar.

5 Holland, James W., “The Beginning of Public Agricultural Experimentation in America: The Trustees’ Garden in Georgia,” Agricultural History 12, no. 3 (July 1938): 271–98Google Scholar, at 274–75.

6 On the collection systems set up by Joseph Banks and the East India Company, see Drayton, Richard, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, 2000), 46Google Scholar; Gascoigne, John, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar; Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995), 311Google Scholar; Brockway, Lucile H., Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979)Google Scholar.

7 For examples of this later style of botany, see note 6; also Arnold, David, “Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The Indian Career of Nathaniel Wallich,” Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 5 (September 2008): 899–928CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 911; Harris, Stephen J., “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 269–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 On these other views of Georgia, see Miller, Randall M., “The Failure of the Colony of Georgia under the Trustees,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 1969): 1–17Google Scholar.

9 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–len CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zachary Dorner, “Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals, Credit, and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2016).

10 McNeill, J. R., Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Charters, Erica, Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years’ War (Chicago, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarti, Pratik, Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 2010)Google Scholar.

11 McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 74–77; Johnston, Edith Duncan, The Houstouns of Georgia (Athens, 1950), 16–20Google Scholar. On efforts to fight malaria in hot climates, see Rutman, Darrett B. and Rutman, Anita H., “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 1976): 31–60CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Chaplin, Joyce E., An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, 1993), 96Google Scholar.

12 On approaching the topic from European science and political economy, see Sörlin, Sverker, “Ordering the World for Europe: Science as Intelligence and Information as Seen from the Northern Periphery,” Osiris, no. 15 (2000): 51–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton, “Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1342–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Margócsy, Dániel, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On colonial knowledge production, see Winterbottom, Anna, “Of the China Root: A Case Study of the Early Modern Circulation of Materia Medica,” Social History of Medicine 28, no. 1 (February 2015): 22–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parsons, Christopher M., “The Natural History of Colonial Science: Joseph-François Lafitau's Discovery of Ginseng and Its Afterlives,” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 1 (January 2016): 37–len CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 The early modern trade in medicines has also seen important recent work from a variety of national perspectives. See, for example, Rutten, A. M. G., Blue Ships: Dutch Ocean Crossing with Multifunctional Drugs and Spices in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Wormer, J. (Rotterdam, 2008)Google Scholar; Wilson, Renate, “Trading in Drugs through Philadelphia in the Eighteenth Century: A Transatlantic Enterprise,” Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (August 2013): 352–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, Timothy, “The Early Modern Globalization of Indian Medicine: Portuguese Dissemination of Drugs and Healing Techniques from South Asia on Four Continents, 1670–1830,” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 19 (2010): 77–98Google Scholar; Cook, Harold J. and Walker, Timothy, “Circulation of Medicine in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (August 2013): 337–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Cook, Harold J., “The Cutting Edge of a Revolution? Medicine and Natural History near the Shores of the North Sea,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. Field, J. V. and James, Frank A. J. L. (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, 54 (“research laboratories”), 58 (“big science”); Cook, Harold J., Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 410. See also Murphy, Kathleen S., “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (October 2013): 637–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Smith, Pamela and Findlen, Paula, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Cook, Matters of Exchange; Schiebinger, Londa and Swan, Claudia, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, 2005)Google Scholar.

16 Efforts have been made to rehabilitate the trustees’ plan from its depiction as a fanciful failure, as well as to better situate the Georgia colony within its colonial, indigenous, and Enlightenment contexts. See Spalding, Phinzy, Oglethorpe in America (Chicago, 1977)Google Scholar; Spalding, Phinzy and Jackson, Harvey H., eds., Oglethorpe in Perspective: Georgia's Founder after Two Hundred Years (Tuscaloosa, 1989)Google Scholar; Wilson, Thomas D., The Oglethorpe Plan: Enlightenment Design in Savannah and Beyond (Charlottesville, 2012)Google Scholar; McIlvenna, Noeleen, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South (Chapel Hill, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Yet the colony's first nineteen years under the trustees’ charter is often elided or described as an economic backwater before the arrival of plantation agriculture; for example, see Pressly, Paul M., On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World (Athens, 2013)Google Scholar.

17 Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders,” 637–40.

18 Hunting, Penelope, A History of the Society of Apothecaries (London, 1998), 33–35Google Scholar, 113, 116–19; Godfrey, Walter H., “Paradise Row, South Side: The Physic Garden,” in Survey of London, vol. 2, Chelsea, Pt. I (London, 1909), 15–22Google Scholar.

19 Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 123–25.

20 Sutton Nicholls, Plan of improvements to Physic Garden, 1725, M0013589, Wellcome Library London; Copy of a paper delivered the Earl of Macclesfield by Mr. Philip Miller the Chelsea Gardener, 1753, M5, Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, London (hereafter SA); Untitled document regarding funding for the Chelsea Physic Garden, c. 1700s, M5, SA. On Sloane's relationship with the garden, see Delbourgo, James, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Catalogue of plants presented to the Royal Society, 1722–1767, MS 8235/1, SA.

22 Stungo, Ruth, “The Royal Society Specimens from the Chelsea Physic Garden, 1722–1799,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 47, no. 2 (July 1993): 213–24Google ScholarPubMed; Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 125–26.

23 Sloane MS 4046, fol. 168, British Library.

24 Barth, Jonathan, “Reconstructing Mercantilism: Consensus and Conflict in British Imperial Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 2 (April 2016): 257–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 282.

25 Ledgers of Imports and Exports, England and Wales, 1697–1780, The National Archives, CUST 3/1-82; Charters, Welfare of the British Armed Forces, chaps. 3–4; Dorner, “Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals,” chaps. 4, 6.

26 On the need for raw materials, see Wallis, “Exotic Drugs”; Receipt Book, 1783–1785, MS 8258, SA.

27 For this background, see Cook, Harold J., “The Rose Case Reconsidered: Physicians, Apothecaries, and the Law in Augustan England,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 45, no. 4 (October 1990): 527–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 550; Cook, Harold J., The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, 1986)Google Scholar; Pelling, Margaret, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640 (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar.

28 In 1620, James VI/I had ruled that the apothecaries alone could compound and sell medicines in the city and its suburbs. Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 33–35, 113.

29 Cook, Harold J., “Practical Medicine and the British Armed Forces after the ‘Glorious Revolution,’” Medical History 34, no. 1 (January 1990): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 12–13.

30 The case against William Rose, a liveryman of the Society of Apothecaries, did not in itself shift the practice of medicine in London but rather confirmed the new organization of a medical marketplace rife with physicians, apothecaries, chemists, druggists, and many others. Cook, “Rose Case Reconsidered,” 527–28. For a discussion of the term “medical marketplace,” see Jenner, Mark S. R. and Wallis, Patrick, “The Medical Marketplace,” in Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850, ed. Jenner, and Wallis, (Basingstoke, 2007), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Bell, Jacobus and Redwood, Theophilus, Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain (London, 1880), 33–34Google Scholar; Porter, Roy and Porter, Dorothy, “The Rise of the English Drugs Industry: The Role of Thomas Corbyn,” Medical History 33, no. 3 (July 1989): 277–95CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 281–83.

32 For additional context, see Kett, Joseph F., “Provincial Medical Practice in England, 1730–1815,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 19, no. 1 (1964): 17–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 19–20; Sonnedecker, Glenn, ed., Kremers and Urdang's History of Pharmacy, 4th ed. (Philadelphia, 1976), 104Google Scholar; Worling, Peter M., “Pharmacy in the Early Modern World, 1617 to 1841 AD,” in Making Medicines: A Brief History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, ed. Anderson, Stuart (London, 2005), 57–76Google Scholar, at 67; Loudon, Irvine, Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, 28; Burnby, Juanita G. L., A Study of the English Apothecary from 1660 to 1760 (London, 1983)Google ScholarPubMed, 12; Wallis, Patrick and Pirohakul, Teerapa, “Medical Revolutions?: The Growth of Medicine in England, 1660–1800,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 510–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wallis, Patrick, “Consumption, Retailing, and Medicine in Early-Modern London,” Economic History Review 61, no. 1 (February 2008): 26–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 27.

33 Hazel Le Rougetel, s.v., “Miller, Philip (1691–1771),” ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18734. For a sense of the medicinal plants at Chelsea, see Miller's Gardeners Dictionary, which discussed domestic and foreign plants growing at the garden and went through numerous editions as a result of its popularity. For example, Miller noted the difficulties of growing American sassafras on English soil and announced the virtues of Virginia snakeroot based on his experiences at Chelsea. Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary. Containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving All Sorts of Trees, Plants, and Flowers […] , 4th corrected and enlarged ed., vol. 3 (London, 1754).

34 Miller, Philip, The Method of Cultivating Madder, As It Is Now Practised by the Dutch in Zealand (London, 1758)Google Scholar.

35 Kalm, Pehr, Kalm's Account of His Visit to England on His Way to America in 1748, trans. Lucas, J. (London, 1892)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 111; Faulkner, Thomas, An Historical and Topographical Description of Chelsea, and Its Environs (London, 1810), 26Google Scholar.

36 Garden Committee Minute Book, 30 April 1750, 42–43, MS 8228/1, SA; Garden Committee Minute Book, 21 August 1722, 1–3, MS 8228/1, SA.

37 Garden Committee Minute Book, 1769–1788, 115–20, 165–66, 210–12, 232, 234, MS 8228/2, SA.

38 Garden Committee Minute Book, 5 January 1731, 1–3, 7, MS 8228/1, SA.

39 Garden Order Book, 1771–1829, 1–2, MS 8236, SA.

40 Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 2002)Google Scholar, 200, 202, 250.

41 Catalogue of plants presented to the Royal Society, 1722–1767, MS 8235/1, SA; Catalogue of the fifty specimens of plants presented to the Royal Society, 1768–1799, MS 8235/2, SA.

42 Articles of Copartnership of the Laboratory Stock, 31 December 1774, box 64/15, SA; Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 153, 166–67; Simmons, Anna, “Medicines, Monopolies and Mortars: The Chemical Laboratory and Pharmaceutical Trade at the Society of Apothecaries in the Eighteenth Century,” Ambix 53, no. 3 (November 2006): 221–36CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 222, 231.

43 Catalogue of drugs manufactured at the Hall, 1741, M6, SA; Laboratory Stock Minutes, 1741–1751, 22 December 1743, MS 8220, SA. For example, the Laboratory Stock manufactured 517 different chemical medicines in 1764; see Simmons, “Medicines, Monopolies and Mortars,” 230.

44 King, Steven, “Accessing Drugs in the Eighteenth-Century Regions,” in From Physick to Pharmacology: Five Hundred Years of British Drug Retailing, ed. Hill, Louise Curth (Aldershot, 2006), 49–50Google Scholar.

45 Porter and Porter, “English Drugs Industry,” 279; Webster, Charles, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975)Google Scholar; for more on early modern chemistry, see Jan Golinski, “Chemistry,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge, 2003), 375–96.

46 Navy Stock Accounts, 1730–1772, MS 8225, SA; General Letter to Fort St. George, 21 November 1766, IOR/E/4/863, fol. 437, British Library.

47 Articles of Copartnership of the Navy Stock, 3 August 1703, box 64/10, SA; Case laid before Counsel by the General Committee of the Navy Stock in the Month of March 1767 and of the Opinions of Counsel thereon, 1767, box 64/10, SA. Simmons, Anna, “Stills, Status, Stocks and Science: The Laboratories at Apothecaries’ Hall in the Nineteenth Century,” Ambix 61, no. 2 (May 2014): 141–61CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 155; Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 164–70.

48 Simms, Brendan, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (New York, 2007), 222–23Google Scholar; Navy Stock Accounts, 1730–1772, MS 8225, SA; Navy Stock Articles of Copartnership, 16 December 1766, box 64/10, SA; Navy Stock Articles of Agreement with Subscribers, 1766–1822, MS T/1, Box B83, SA; Court Minute Book, 1745–1767, 21, 23, MS 8200/7, SA; Laboratory Stock Agreement, 1767, MS 8215, SA.

49 Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine, 40–41.

50 Cook, Harold J., “Markets and Cultures: Medical Specifics and the Reconfiguration of the Body in Early Modern Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (2011): 123–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 To Linnaeus in Sweden, which lacked overseas colonies of its own, specimens and facts about them represented what Sverker Sörlin has described as “hard cash” on a new market. This logic applied to Sweden's policy of import substitution whereby attempts were made to transfer valuable colonial commodities, such as tea, cochineal, quinine, and saffron, to Sweden where they could be adapted and then grown in bulk without needing overseas colonies. Sörlin, “Ordering the World,” 62–64, at 64; Schiebinger, Londa, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 57Google Scholar.

52 Grove, Green Imperialism, 175–76, 196.

53 Instruction for sending Persons to Georgia to collect Plants and Trees, November 1732, M5, SA; Martyn, Impartial Inquiry, 22.

54 Martyn, Reasons for Establishing, 17, 26; Coleman, Colonial Georgia, 111.

55 McCusker, John J. and Menard, Russell R., The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 173–76Google Scholar; Mountgomery, Robert, A Discourse Concerning the design'd Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina […] (London, 1717)Google Scholar, title page.

56 Krafka, Joseph, “An Account of the Attempt of the Society of Apothecaries to Establish the Drug Trade in Colonial Georgia,” Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association 28, no. 9 (September 1939): 616–19Google Scholar, at 616. See also Gordon, Maurice B., Æsculapius Comes to the Colonies (Ventnor, 1949)Google Scholar; Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 126–27; on import substitution, mercantilism, and cameralism, see Koerner, Lisbet, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA, 1999)Google Scholar.

57 Bleichmar, Daniela et al. , eds., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, 2009)Google Scholar; Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, chap. 1.

58 Barth, “Reconstructing Mercantilism,” 269.

59 Martyn, Reasons for Establishing, 3, 4, 5; Oglethorpe, New and Accurate Account, 55, 56.

60 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 276.

61 Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 10–12.

62 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 271–72.

63 Candler, Colonial Records 3:181; 1:223. There is a rich historiography on the allure of silk cultivation for those with economic ambitions in the Atlantic world. Ewan, Joseph, “Silk Culture in the Colonies,” Agricultural History 41, no. 1 (January 1969): 129–42Google Scholar; Stephens, Pauline Tyson, “The Silk Industry in Georgia,” Georgia Review 7, no. 1 (Spring 1953): 39–49Google Scholar; Bonner, James C., “Silk Growing in the Georgia Colony,” Agricultural History 43, no. 1 (January 1969): 143–48Google Scholar; Marsh, Ben, “Silk Hopes in Colonial South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 78, no. 4 (November 2012): 807–54Google Scholar.

64 Martyn, Impartial Inquiry, 22; Candler, Colonial Records 1:130.

65 Bonner, James C., A History of Georgia Agriculture, 1732–1860 (Athens, 1964), 13Google Scholar.

66 Instruction for sending Persons to Georgia, November 1732, M5, SA.

67 The English Remedy: Or, Talbor's Wonderful Secret, for Cureing of Agues and Feavers (London, 1682), 7–10; Cook, “Markets and Cultures,” 133; Crawford, Matthew James, The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800 (Pittsburgh, 2016), 54–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Unlike other drugs that had arrived in Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century (namely guaiacum and sarsaparilla), the first shipments of cinchona bark to London were recorded only in the 1680s. Cinchona imports increased substantially in the first half of the eighteenth century in contrast to trends in the trade of many of these other drugs.

68 Cook, “Markets and Cultures,” 140; Cowen, David L., “The British North American Colonies as a Source of Drugs,” in Vierzig Jahre (Internationale) Gesellschaft Fur Geschichte Der Pharmazie, ed. Dann, Georg Edmund (Stuttgart, 1966), 47–59Google Scholar, at 49–50.

69 Corbyn & Co. Manufacturing Recipe Book, 1748–1847, MS 5446, Wellcome Library London; Recipe for Phosphas Mercuri, Extract Seneka, and Extract Sarsaparilla, c. 18th c, MS 5448/41, Wellcome Library London; Corbyn & Co. Inventories and Valuations of Stock, 1761–1770, MS 5452, Wellcome Library London; Catalogues of drugs manufactured at the Hall, 1741, 1791, M6, SA; Directions for the Use of Box of Medicines per Hunt & Greenleaf, April 1750, Corbyn & Co. Foreign Letterbook (1742–1755), MS 5442, Wellcome Library London. On the spread of malaria, see Crawford, Andean Wonder Drug, 44.

70 Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders,” 663–64.

71 Miller, Gardeners Dictionary.

72 Ewan, “Silk Culture in the Colonies,” 135; Johnston, Houstouns of Georgia, 9–16; Candler, Colonial Records 2:5–6, 59–61. For details of the South Sea Company's trade under the asiento, see Wennerlind, Carl, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sperling, John G., The South Sea Company: An Historical Essay and Bibliographical Finding List (Boston, 1962)Google Scholar; Palmer, Colin A., Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana, 1981)Google Scholar; Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders,” 660–61; Brown, Vera Lee, “The South Sea Company and Contraband Trade,” American Historical Review 31, no. 4 (July 1926): 662–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, George H., “Contraband Trade under the Asiento, 1730–1739,” American Historical Review 51, no. 1 (October 1945): 55–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Delbourgo, Collecting the World, 238–39; Desmond, Ray, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists including Plant Collectors, Flower Painters and Garden Designers (London, 1994), 486Google Scholar.

74 Candler, Colonial Records 21:191–95, at 193. Millar, like other European travelers, relied on the experience and expertise of indigenous and enslaved peoples for help in identifying Jesuit's bark and the other drugs he sought. On similar actions by bioprospectors, see Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 51, 72, 74–75, 80, 87.

75 Candler, Colonial Records 21:191–95, at 194; Walker, Geoffrey J., Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (London, 1979), 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 200–3.

76 Candler, Colonial Records 2:59–61.

77 Candler, Colonial Records 21:281–82; Stearns, Raymond Phineas, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, 1970)Google Scholar, 332; Candler, Colonial Records 22:150–52.

78 Candler, Colonial Records 5:65–66.

79 Candler, Colonial Records 5:229; Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 283; Krafka, “Drug Trade in Colonial Georgia,” 617.

80 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 274–76.

81 A new voyage to Georgia: By a young gentleman […], 2nd ed. (London, 1737), 40–41; An Extract from the Journal of Mr. Commissary Von Reck and of the Rev. Mr. Bolzius […] (London, 1734), 12–15; Candler, Colonial Records 3:86, 382.

82 Moore, Francis, A voyage to Georgia: Begun in the year 1735 […] (London, 1744), 31Google Scholar.

83 Williams, Julie Hedgepeth, The Significance of the Printed Word in Early America: Colonists’ Thoughts on the Role of the Press (Westport, 1999), 44Google Scholar; Coulter, E. Merton, ed., The Journal of Peter Gordon, 1732–1735 (Athens, 1963), 24, 25–26Google Scholar.

84 Candler, Colonial Records 5:38; see also 39, 208, 224.

85 Tailfer, Patrick, Anderson, Hugh, and Douglas, David, A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia […] (Charles Town, 1741)Google Scholar, 26, 37 (“large Hill”), 69. On the “Malcontents” who advocated implementing a system of enslaved labor, see Pressly, Colonial Georgia, 27–32; Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 290–91. Candler also uses the term in his indexes to characterize these settlers; Candler, Colonial Records 5:227–28.

86 Stephens, Thomas, A Brief Account of the Causes that Have Retarded the Progress of the Colony of Georgia in America (London, 1743), 8Google Scholar.

87 Stephens, A Brief Account, 8.

88 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 290. The case was taken to trial, but was dismissed as the jury did not believe the allegations against the attackers.

89 Candler, Colonial Records 22:77–78, 229.

90 For example, see Tailfer, Anderson, and Douglas, True and Historical Narrative, 29, 66, 30; Potter, David M. Jr., “The Rise of the Plantation System in Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 16, no. 2 (June 1932): 114–35Google Scholar, at 114.

91 Candler, Colonial Records 3:14–15, 17, 51–52, 86, 169; Spalding, Oglethorpe in America, 43; Pressly, Colonial Georgia, 25; Taylor, Alan, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York, 2001), 241Google Scholar.

92 In contrast, indigo would soon make its way to South Carolina and develop into a large-scale industry dependent on enslaved labor. Rembert, David H. Jr., “The Indigo of Commerce in Colonial North America,” Economic Botany 33, no. 2 (April–June 1979): 128–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feeser, Andrea, Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life (Athens, 2013), 78–79Google Scholar, 83–84, 102–3, 105; Morgan, Philip, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low-Country (Chapel Hill, 1998), 222Google Scholar; Anishanslin, Zara, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven, 2016), 101–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Candler, Colonial Records 1:362–63, 556.

94 Candler, Colonial Records 3:59–60; 21:346.

95 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 291–92.

96 Taylor, American Colonies, 243; McIlvenna, Free Georgia, chap. 6.

97 Candler, Colonial Records 2:338; Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 293–94, 296–97. On the site's more recent history and redevelopment, see Bill Dawers, “Hotels, Stores and Condos May Sprout at Trustees,” Savannah Morning News, 15 July 2001, 2D; Gail Krueger, “Historic Building Collapse,” Savannah Morning News, 1 September 2001, 1A; Gail Krueger, “How the Garden Grows,” Savannah Morning News, 16 September 2001, 10D; Mary Landers, “Trustees’ Garden: Site Cleanup Resumes,” Savannah Morning News, 22 August 2002, 1C; Mary Landers, “Trustees’ Garden Sprouts Again,” Savannah Morning News, 5 June 2008, C1; “Vision Comes to Life at Trustees’ Garden Site,” Savannah Morning News, 10 April 2018, A10.

98 Other examples include Drayton, Nature's Government; Grove, Green Imperialism; Desmond, Ray, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens (London, 1995)Google Scholar; Arnold, “Plant Capitalism”; Schiebinger, Plants and Empire. On current thinking regarding the continued use of distinctions between center and periphery, see also Parrish, Susan Scott, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar.

99 Arnold, “Plant Capitalism,” 911. In general, this was a time when science became detached from its old patrons, the churches and courts, and attached to the institutions of mercantile capitalism, the state, and trading companies; see Sörlin, “Ordering the World,” 69.

100 Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 76.

101 Charters, Welfare of the British Armed Forces, 3–6, 153, 174.

102 The National Archives, CUST 3; Navy Stock Accounts, MS 8225, SA. The plantation complex constituted perhaps the principal destination for British medicines during this period; see Dorner, “Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals,” chap. 4.

103 Many companies tried to force practitioners back into their membership in this period. See Berlin, Michael, “Guilds in Decline? London Livery Companies and the Rise of a Liberal Economy, 1600–1800,” in Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. Epstein, S. R. and Prak, Maarten (Cambridge, 2008), 316–41Google Scholar.

104 Copy of a paper delivered the Earl of Macclesfield, 1753, M5, SA. On its early membership and legal status, see Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, chap. 1; Barrett, C. R. B., The History of the Society of Apothecaries of London (London, 1905), xix–xxxixGoogle Scholar, chap. 1.

105 List of Money Paid to Support the Chelsea Physic Garden, 20 March 1753, M5, SA; List of Benefactors to the Society, 1621–1759, box 39/4, SA; John Haynes, The Physic Garden, Chelsea: a plain view, 1751, L0047939, Wellcome Library London.

106 Kalm, Visit to England, 111.

107 Copy of a paper delivered the Earl of Macclesfield, 1753, M5, SA. Parker had served in parliament in the 1720s, and in 1752 was elected president of the Royal Society. A. M. Clerke, s.v., “Parker, George, second earl of Macclesfield (c.1697–1764),” ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/21299.

108 Crawford, Andean Wonder Drug, 67. Recent scholarship has emphasized the social embeddedness of scientific practice, as well as the frameworks of patronage systems, state power, and categories of difference that shaped the daily activities of natural history. See Sörlin, “Ordering the World,” 53–54.

109 Navy Stock Accounts, MS 8225, SA; Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 174.

110 Bengal General Letter, 21 November 1766, IOR/E/4/618, fols. 467–68, British Library; Fort William to Court, 28 November 1766, in C. S. Srinivasachari, ed., Fort William-India House Correspondence, vol. 4 (Delhi, 1962), 444.

111 John Raithby, ed., “An Act for encouraging the Cultivation, and for the better Preservation of Trees, Roots, Plants and Shrubs, 6 Geo. 3, c. 36,” The Statutes at Large of England and of Great-Britain, vol. 12, From 1 George III AD 1760 to 7 George III AD 1767 (London, 1811), 533–34; Wulf, Andrea, The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession (London, 2009), 136–37Google Scholar, 166.

112 Garden Committee Minute Book, 1769–1788, 30 November 1770, 84–85, MS 8228/2, SA.

113 Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 134–35; Wulf, Brother Gardeners, 191, 198. On Banks, see Drayton, Nature's Government, xiii–xvi. For the case of economic botany in the Spanish Atlantic context, see, for example, Bleichmar, Daniela, “Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. Delbourgo, James and Dew, Nicholas (New York, 2008), 225–52Google Scholar; De Vos, Paula, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 209–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114 Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 76.

115 Banks remained a lifelong supporter of the botanical work occurring at Chelsea. He donated to the garden hundreds of samples collected on his voyages—five hundred kinds of seeds in 1781 alone. Drewitt, Frederic Dawtrey, The Romance of the Apothecaries’ Garden at Chelsea (London, 1922), 69–72Google Scholar; Godfrey, “Paradise Row,” 15–22; Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 76; Garden Order Book, 1771–1829, 8, 25–26, MS 8236, SA; Garden Committee Minute Book, 1769–1788, 106–7, 145–47, 213–15, 232, MS 8228/2, SA; Stearn, William T., “Miller's Gardeners Dictionary and Its Abridgement,” Journal of the Society for Bibliography of Natural History 7, no. 1 (July 1974): 125–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 138. Recent work has emphasized the influence of Banks's local concerns on his global pursuits, namely Hoppit, Julian, “Sir Joseph Banks's Provincial Turn,” Historical Journal 61, no. 2 (2018): 403–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116 The British government appointed John Ellis (Fellow of the Royal Society) royal agent in West Florida when it acquired the colony in 1763. In addition to his duties overseeing crown allocations, Ellis employed local botanists to collect plants in the former Spanish territory, which he successfully, unlike Robert Millar, sent back to England. He had also collaborated with Henry Ellis (1721–1806), an early governor of Georgia, to send seeds to the new royal colony during the 1750s. Groner, Julius and Rea, Robert R., “John Ellis, King's Agent, and West Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 66, no. 4 (April 1988): 385–98Google Scholar; Rauschenberg, Roy A., “John Ellis, Royal Agent for West Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (July 1983): 1–24Google Scholar; Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 333–36.

117 Georgia Gazette, 10 January 1765, 24 January 1765, 11 April 1765; 17 January 1770, 25 April 1770; Augusta Chronicle, 12 May 1792.

118 Argo Roersch van der Hoogte and Toine Pieters, “Science in the Service of Colonial Agro-Industrialism: The Case of Cinchona Cultivation in the Dutch and British East Indies, 1852–1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47, part A (September 2014): 12–22; Goss, Andrew, The Floracrats: State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the Enlightenment in Indonesia (Madison, 2011)Google Scholar; Drayton, Nature's Government, 207–20; McCracken, Donal P., Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (London, 1997)Google Scholar, chap. 3.

119 James Anderson to Governor and Council of Madras, 17 November 1789, IOR/P/241/15, fols. 3185–87, British Library. See also Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany, 1996), 166–68; Arnold, “Plant Capitalism,” 911.

120 The first garden at Kew was founded in 1759 to house the royal plant collection. By the Victorian era, it had shifted from a pleasure garden to a research center staffed by professional botanists. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, 3–5, 7; Mackay, David, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780–1801 (New York, 1985), 193Google Scholar; Drayton, Nature's Government, 48–49, 106, 116–17. On the further development of Kew, see Endersby, Jim, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago, 2008)Google Scholar.

121 Charters, Welfare of the British Armed Forces, 16; Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine, 64, 76.

122 Carman, Harry J., ed., American Husbandry, 1775 (Port Washington, 1964), 193–94Google Scholar, 196–97.

123 This was not the case initially as cotton seeds play no special role in quintessential nineteenth-century accounts of the garden. Faulkner, Thomas, An Historical and Topographical Description of Chelsea and Its Environs (London, 1810), 22Google Scholar; Field, Henry, Memoirs, Historical and Illustrative, of the Botanick Garden at Chelsea (London, 1802)Google Scholar; Blunt, Reginald, Paradise Row or a Broken Piece of Old Chelsea (London, 1906)Google Scholar.

124 Drewitt, Romance of the Apothecaries’ Garden, 58. This version of events is preserved in a new edition of Drewitt's book published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 (p. 66). See also Arthur W. Hill, “The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens,” Annals of Missouri Botanical Garden 2, nos. 1/2 (February–April 1915): 185–240, at 212; Wheelwright, Edith Grey, The Physick Garden: Medicinal Plants and Their History (New York, 1935), 142Google Scholar.

125 For example, see Winn, Christopher, I Never Knew That about London (London, 2012), 176Google Scholar; Tames, Richard, London: A Cultural History (Oxford, 2006), 20Google Scholar; Oakes, George W. and Chapman, Alexandra, Turn Right at the Foundation: Fifty-Three Walking Tours through Europe's Most Enchanting Cities (London, 1996), 42Google Scholar.

126 The species of cotton familiar to North Americans most likely came from South America, southern Mexico, and the West Indies. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 154n29; Brand, Donald D., “The Origin and Early Distribution of New World Cultivated Plants,” Agricultural History 13, no. 2 (April 1939): 109–17Google Scholar, at 114; Stephens, S. G., “The Origin of Sea Island Cotton,” Agricultural History 50, no. 2 (April 1976): 391–99Google Scholar, at 391–95. For a more up-to-date description of the rise of cotton in the American South, see Chaplin, Joyce E., “Creating a Cotton South in Georgia and South Carolina, 1760–1815,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 2 (May 1991): 171–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127 Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014), 101Google Scholar.

128 Grove, Green Imperialism, 336–37; see also Arnold, “Plant Capitalism.”