The world trade in medicinal plants from Spanish America, 1717-1815
Between 1717 and 1778 the American medicinal plants landed legally in Spain tripled, from 45 tonnes a year to 155 - cinchona, jalap, sarsaparilla, ipecacuanha, guaiacum, the balsams. The knowledge that identified them was Andean, Tupi-Guarani and Araucanian; the trade that carried them was largely not Spanish, and by 1774 Spanish officials reckoned their own merchants handled a sixth of the traffic in a bark that grew nowhere but in their king's dominions.
Why this wins its question: The usual English treatment of American drugs in Europe is a list of plant names with the word "introduced" attached and no quantity anywhere in it. What is set out here is the arithmetic: 83,387 arrobas landed between 1717 and 1738 against 418,977 between 1747 and 1778, an annual 64 tonnes of purges and 83 of cinchona at mid-century, and that cinchona tonnage converted into 1.7 million treatable cases of malaria a year in a Europe of 71.7 million people. It is also the only version of this story that carries its own four counterweights on the same page rather than in a rebuttal: that the pharmacology was Andean, Tupi-Guarani and Araucanian before it was Spanish; that by the eighteenth century saying so had itself become a marketing trope; that Spain moved perhaps a sixth of the trade in a bark that grew only in its own dominions; and that two of the bulk commodities in the hold, guaiacum and sarsaparilla, did not cure the disease they were sold for. The price series from Mainz - 55 gulden a pound against 80 to 100 gulden a year - is what keeps the achievement from reading as a public health triumph.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The volume is measurable and it is large. Between 1717 and 1738 Spain imported a total of 83,387 arrobas of medicinal plants from its American territories - an average of 3,970 arrobas, or 45 tonnes, a year. Between 1747 and 1778 the total was 418,977 arrobas, 13,515 arrobas or 155 tonnes every year. The trade tripled inside a generation.
The mid-century cargo was concentrated in a few drugs. Across 1747-1778 Spain imported an annual average of 64 tonnes of "purges" - chiefly jalap root from the Xalapa region - and 83 tonnes of cinchona, the Peruvian bark that was the period's only specific against malaria. Sarsaparilla, ipecacuanha, guaiacum, and the balsams of Peru and Tolu made up much of the rest.
Converted into patients, the figures stop being commercial and become epidemiological. Around 1750, when Europe had a population of 71.7 million, the 83 tonnes of cinchona Spain imported legally would by itself have been sufficient for some 1.7 million cases of malaria - 2.3 per cent of the European population - every year. By the middle of the century an average of one dose of sarsaparilla per every two people was being imported into England alone.
The pharmacological knowledge was not European in origin and the article says so directly: the understanding and experience of Andeans, Tupi-Guarani or Araucanians had gone into identifying, collecting and preparing some of the most widely used and universally sold American remedies - the emetic properties of the dried root of ipecacuanha, the anti-malarial effects of cinchona, the cleansing potency of the greens of canchalagua. What the Spanish system supplied was the identification of that knowledge as tradeable, a route, and a regulated apparatus of collection at Cadiz and of distribution through the Real Botica at Madrid.
The credit has to be given with the same source's qualification attached. By the eighteenth century, indigenous involvement in the making of these drugs "was also becoming a cultural trope, a discourse, for European naturalists, merchants and officials to capitalise on" - that is, the Indian origin of a remedy was by then partly a sales argument, and an invocation of native authority in a print advertisement is not evidence of a native contribution to the particular preparation being sold.
Spain did not capture the trade it opened. Spanish officials estimated in 1774 that even of the total volume of trade in cinchona - "a plant that grows only in the dominions of His Majesty" - Spanish merchants handled but "one-sixth". The official Cadiz registers on which the tonnage above rests are therefore a floor and not a ceiling, and the beneficiaries of the traffic were disproportionately foreign merchants and smugglers.
Not all of it worked, and the record of failure is in the same literature as the record of success. Guaiacum was hailed as an anti-syphilitic early in the sixteenth century and fell out of favour within decades: it was found by experience that people suffering from syphilis were not benefited by its administration. Sarsaparilla, promoted for the same indication, was similarly ineffective for it. An honest ledger of this trade contains a specific that transformed the treatment of malaria and two bulk commodities that did not do what they were sold to do.
Price put the best of it out of reach of the people who most needed it. In the Electorate of Mainz, red cinchona bark - the quality local physicians most esteemed - cost 55 gulden a pound and bark of lesser quality still cost between 9 and 25, while a worker's or even an artisan's annual income then amounted to some 80 to 100 gulden at most. One pound of the good bark could cost most of a year's wages.
Against that, the article argues that consumption of these plants was not confined to an elite few, because religious orders, charitable institutions and governments - Bourbon Spain prominently among them - distributed medicines to the poor. This claim was taken from the first reading of the article and was not re-verified sentence by sentence on the second pass, and the confidence here is lowered to say so.