Trading Medicines. The Global Drug Trade in Perspective. (360G-Wellcome-103290_Z_13_Z)

This workshop explores the global trade in medicinal drugs between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Access to medicines was one of the motivations for European expansion, but little is known about the size or structure of the early modern global market in drugs that emerged as international exchange systems expanded and deepened in this period. Most detailed work on trade has focused on bulk commodities instead. By bringing together researchers working on the drug trade in the Spanish Emp ire, the Portuguese Empire, the Netherlands and Russia, the workshop will seek to develop a new understanding of the organisation, scale and composition of the drug trade that is properly comparative in nature, and that explores crucial linkages between the Americas, Asia and Europe. Our aim is to revise and expand historical understanding of the drug trade in order to build a broad picture of developments across the early modern period, and the consequences they had for producers, traders and c onsumers. By focusing on the scale, structure and development of medical trade flows, the workshop will complement recent studies that have shed light on the negotiation, interpretation and reception of new medicines.