“Drogas Modernas”: Drugs, Globalization, and Hybrid Knowledge in the Portuguese Atlantic, 1680–1750

In the hybrid colonial spaces of Amazonia and Angola, figures such as African slaves, indigenous Americans and mestiço healers emerged as viable alternatives to European medical practitioners. These groups served as informants regarding controversial yet valuable drugs such as cinchona and ipecacuanha among both Portuguese colonists and metropolitan natural philosophers like the members of London’s Royal Society. Yet indigenous and colonial populations were more than static purveyors of ‘traditional’ knowledge and techniques: they were active consumers, discoverers and popularizers of novel tropical drugs in their own right.  

The study of this emerging transcultural drug trade offers distinctive insights into how individuals and local knowledge became integrated into global systems of exchange at the dawn of the eighteenth century. This paper hones in on the sensory and religious role of drugs in the backlands (sertões) of Amazonia and Angola. It uncovers two case studies from the Portuguese archives: the efforts of Governor Francisco de Sá e Menezes to identify Amazonian species of cinchona (or “Jesuit’s Bark”) by collaborating with Tapuya Indians (c. 1683), and the account of a cavalry officer who claimed to have learned of a “miraculous cure” for demon-possession in the jungles of the Congo (1720s). Both of these stories point to the need to integrate the experience of medicinal drugs with larger narratives about medical consumption, science and empire, and European-indigenous relations. Studying the embodied effects of drugs – the ways that they were subjectively experienced by drug merchants, growers and consumers – can clarify how medicine interacted with non-European religious practices, epistemologies of nature, sociability, and other fine-grained facets of human existence that previous works on the Columbian Exchange have failed to discern.