Few historical works on drugs and empire account for the decisive nature of epistemic uncertainty and taxonomical incoherence that underlie meanings of intoxication and mind-altering substances. Age of Intoxication, as a corrective, offers a complex trajectory of drug as both designation and concept. Across six chapters, Benjamin Breen materializes eighteenth century developments in plant knowledge and medical practice spanning the Portuguese and British imperial worlds to produce a compelling genealogy of the separation of drug and pharmaceutical. Similar historically structured counterfoils—apothecary and pharmacist, self-experimentation and clinical observation, fetish and medicine—that uphold the conceptual framework of the book allow Breen to map several uneven trajectories into a coherent excavation. By reading across archives for Portuguese drug seekers, apothecaries, Jesuit missionaries, African healers, and English networks of scientific learning, in each chapter Breen demonstrates the fundamental salience of intoxication to modes of reason in the early modern world.
Early Portuguese seekers of drogas de sertao, or drugs in the backlands of colonial territories like Brazil, were not bioprospectors. With bare comprehension of indigenous lifeworlds, their fitful efforts to reproduce plant specimens were often misunderstandings, lacking fuller knowledge of the ecological habitat, existing etymologies, social practices of use, and modes of economic and cultural value. For Breen, such false starts are indispensable to historicizing how knowledge of plants such as quina (the source of antimalarial quinine) was fundamentally shaped by lack, inconsistency, and ambiguity. Portuguese imperial collectors and disseminators of plant knowledge did not therefore “discover” drugs as much as they invented them, based on what they found, to suit the needs of markets and standards of intellectual credibility in Europe. The resulting hybrid conflations of substances, names, effects, and associated techniques of production with European prejudices in the seventeenth-century Iberian Atlantic underlay how some substances were reinvented as globally traded drugs and others rendered pernicious in the colonies.
Apothecaries, physicians, and healers of all genders personified the process of commodifying drugs as licit or illicit in the emergent medical marketplace of Europe. Trading in the currency of prejudice, Christian licensed physicians and the Inquisitorial state charged Jewish apothecaries, African healers, and traders of substances from the Indies with the burden of defending their foreignness and alleged impurity. To better situate the invention of medicinal drugs, as opposed to spices and fetishes, Breen argues for the importance of hidden subaltern actors in an archive where the erasure of their contributions was pivotal to commodification. While the book does not address conceptions of the body and critical approaches to race and gender in the early modern Atlantic world, Breen's capacious use of legal and medical archives at least highlights contributions of boticarias (women apothecaries) to the commerce and use of drugs.
Feiticaria, the Iberian term for practices of crafting objects that index both magic and medicine, provided Portuguese speakers with an epistemic register to both perceive and render West Central African spirituality and pharmacy as toxic and superstitious. Older Mediterranean meanings of fetishes as charms and amulets transformed through European fears of knowledge wielded by African healers and herbalists in Congo and Angola. In Breen's argument, the fetish concept serves as a generative framework to bridge histories of substances and material objects that constituted both poison and medicine in the circulatory networks of the Atlantic World. As Brazilian exports of alcohols like cachaça and gerebita, alongside smoking tobacco, to western Africa grew in proportion, associations of spirituality and status unfolding in the slave societies of the Americas made their way back into African territories where they were absorbed into existing epistemologies of intoxication. Breen persuasively contends, however, that the fetish associations of several drugs, like the barks described in Francisco de Buytrago's text Tree of Life, effectively also impeded their commodification for a global market because their efficacy was premised on observational knowledge of African nganga (spiritual healers).
The expansion of British imperial power in the eighteenth century turned imperial London into a site of confluence that shaped the dominant meanings of drugs. Over the last three chapters, Breen places Portuguese treatises on plant drugs, the contributions of Jesuit missionaries, and networks of intermediaries in colonies like Goa and Brazil as critical nodes in the web of scientific thought centered on London's Royal Society. Such a “Republic of Letters” framework, Breen argues, suffered duress under gradually growing anti-Catholic sentiment in England. Complicated processes of invention, or rebranding, of drugs for European markets that erased Jewish or Indigenous American and African origins also gradually smothered traces of Jesuit and Portuguese networks. Such perspectives make the book a timely contribution to the growing interest in early modern cultures of addiction following Rebecca Lemon's Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England (2018).
Developing ideas in alkaloidal chemistry subsequently defined how compounds could be designated as pharmaceutical. They challenged early modern humoral theories of intoxication and the body, and enabled newer discourses and practices of purification and compound drugs. Pharmacists who could strip the potentially severe properties of plants like opium to produce compound mixtures of anodyne qualities like laudanum gradually began to validate the differentiation of intoxicants along a relative hierarchy of mildness and potency. Such a sliding scale eventually encapsulated many intoxicants from South Asia and Africa. On the other hand, entheogens from the Americas, like ayahuasca and peyote, which were far more mind-altering and did not fit emergent epistemologies of intoxication based on alkaloids and acids, remained bound up in Iberian imperial prejudices against devil worship.
The book's closing chapter on opium is hurried. Breen uses the discovery of domesticated poppy in Western Europe as early as 4000 BCE to ask how Chinese, Indian, and Persian contexts instead became the dominant canvas for narrating opium. He suggests that the foreignness of opium and its techniques of smoking, especially as raw latex, was socially constructed against morphine in Europe as an improved and tamed form. While critical scholarship on Orientalism and race is again curiously absent, the chapter's provocation in the wider arc of the book is still critical for scholars thinking about race and gender structurally in the history of medicine. Ultimately, Age of Intoxication illuminates how designating drug and pharmaceutical apart builds on the mutability of intoxicating substances and on European interventions to craft them into racialized schemas. Breen's insistence on putting early seventeenth-century imperial connotations of toxicity and heresy in the Atlantic world at the heart of global approaches to drug history provides scholars with a rich intellectual architecture of meanings that continue to define cultural politics around intoxicant substances in Europe today.
