The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800

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Review "By untangling the 'epistemic culture' of the early modern Spanish global monarchy, Crawford offers a sweeping counternarrative to any simplified account of the rise of scientific modernity as a tool of empire...Crawford shatters the Spanish Black Legend. The Andean Wonder Drug fully brings to light a Spanish Empire that was constitutionally far more tolerant of epistemic diversity than, say, the British, largely because the former never developed a simpleminded discourse of scientific 'objectivity' as modernity that the latter did. There were many other ways of living the Enlightenment than those the historiography narrowly peddles." - Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society2017 Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize, Honorable Mention, Latin America/Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association Read more About the Author Matthew James Crawford is associate professor of history at Kent State University. Read more