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Merchants of Medicines. The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century

The transformation of chemical medicines into global commodities lies at the core of Zachary Dorner’sMerchants of Medicines. The book traces the emergence and development of a long-distance trade in medicines that spanned the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world, Southeast Asia, the western coast of Africa, and the Caribbean. Dorner’s persuasive argument is that the commercialisation of manufactured medicines contributed significantly to the British imperial project. He further suggests that the bulk trade in medicines “opened the possibility to view all persons, free and unfree, across the British empire as alike in the face of disease, a possibility soon foreclosed by hardening categories of bodily differences” (73). The book has methodological roots in commodity studies and joins rapidly growing historical conversations about the connections between commerce, health, and empire. Drawing on an impressive array of primary sources, Dorner weaves together the histories of successful apothecaries and merchants in London and North America with those of plantation owners, Royal Navy officers, and East India Company directors. Ultimately, this allows him to illustrate that these imperial actors considered medicines to be central to maintaining and restoring the health of large groups of people – enslaved people, soldiers, and sailors – whose ability to work was a necessary condition in the construction and operation of empire. Furthermore, the book shows that choosing these new medicines over others had more to do with commercial expediency than with well-defined medical ideas. Chapter one shows how a new generation of London-based chemists and apothecaries created a new trade from the building blocks of the existing pharmaceutical tradition, such as the secrecy of recipes and personal credit. The new scale of production forced these actors to innovate at the levels of technology, organisation, and finance. For example, bigger furnaces and laboratories required new fire insurance, while increased engagement with distant clients and progressively complex partnerships led to better recordkeeping. In chapter two, Dorner connects the trade of medicines with key elements of empire, such as the slave trade, the sugar trade, and military organisation. He illustrates the difficulties of transcontinental commerce, including the paucity of information and credit extension issues that merchants grappled with on a daily basis. Following the career of Silvester Gardiner, who started as a surgeon and ended up as a landowner in control of local trade, chapter four demonstrates the interdependence between the medicines trade, the military, agriculture, shipping, and land speculation in North America. Chapters three and five clarify the cycle of supply and demand with a discussion of the bulk purchases of medicines by plantation owners, East India Company directors, and the Pennsylvania Hospital – for the enslaved work force, growing military population, and the “sick poor,” respectively. Chapter five brings this history to an end, showing how these institutions progressively worked towards pharmaceutical self-