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From Chelsea to Savannah: Medicines and Mercantilism in the Atlantic World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2019

Abstract

In 1732, the London Society of Apothecaries joined the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America in a scheme to establish an experimental garden in the nascent colony. This garden was designed to benefit the trustees’ bottom line, as well as to provide much-needed drugs to British apothecaries at a time of increasing overseas warfare and the mortality it entailed. The effort to grow medicinal plants in Georgia drew together a group of partners who began to recognize the economic potential of botany, and of medicinal plants specifically, in calculations of political economy. The plan depended on the knowledge production occurring at the apothecaries’ Chelsea Physic Garden and their efforts to adapt to a changing medicine trade by finding customers among state-sponsored institutions. Taken together, the histories of the gardens at Chelsea and Savannah illustrate that a perceived need for medicines brought plants into expressions of state power long before the network of botanical stations emblematic of the nineteenth-century empire. This earlier transatlantic story pairs the commercialization of health-care provision with shifts in imperial policy in the long eighteenth century.

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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2019 

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References

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63 Candler, Colonial Records 3:181; 1:223. There is a rich historiography on the allure of silk cultivation for those with economic ambitions in the Atlantic world. Ewan, Joseph, “Silk Culture in the Colonies,” Agricultural History 41, no. 1 (January 1969): 129–42Google Scholar; Stephens, Pauline Tyson, “The Silk Industry in Georgia,” Georgia Review 7, no. 1 (Spring 1953): 3949Google Scholar; Bonner, James C., “Silk Growing in the Georgia Colony,” Agricultural History 43, no. 1 (January 1969): 143–48Google Scholar; Marsh, Ben, “Silk Hopes in Colonial South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 78, no. 4 (November 2012): 807–54Google Scholar.

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68 Cook, “Markets and Cultures,” 140; Cowen, David L., “The British North American Colonies as a Source of Drugs,” in Vierzig Jahre (Internationale) Gesellschaft Fur Geschichte Der Pharmazie, ed. Dann, Georg Edmund (Stuttgart, 1966), 4759Google Scholar, at 49–50.

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70 Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders,” 663–64.

71 Miller, Gardeners Dictionary.

72 Ewan, “Silk Culture in the Colonies,” 135; Johnston, Houstouns of Georgia, 9–16; Candler, Colonial Records 2:5–6, 59–61. For details of the South Sea Company's trade under the asiento, see Wennerlind, Carl, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sperling, John G., The South Sea Company: An Historical Essay and Bibliographical Finding List (Boston, 1962)Google Scholar; Palmer, Colin A., Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana, 1981)Google Scholar; Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders,” 660–61; Brown, Vera Lee, “The South Sea Company and Contraband Trade,” American Historical Review 31, no. 4 (July 1926): 662–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, George H., “Contraband Trade under the Asiento, 1730–1739,” American Historical Review 51, no. 1 (October 1945): 5567CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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74 Candler, Colonial Records 21:191–95, at 193. Millar, like other European travelers, relied on the experience and expertise of indigenous and enslaved peoples for help in identifying Jesuit's bark and the other drugs he sought. On similar actions by bioprospectors, see Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 51, 72, 74–75, 80, 87.

75 Candler, Colonial Records 21:191–95, at 194; Walker, Geoffrey J., Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789 (London, 1979), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 200–3.

76 Candler, Colonial Records 2:59–61.

77 Candler, Colonial Records 21:281–82; Stearns, Raymond Phineas, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, 1970)Google Scholar, 332; Candler, Colonial Records 22:150–52.

78 Candler, Colonial Records 5:65–66.

79 Candler, Colonial Records 5:229; Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 283; Krafka, “Drug Trade in Colonial Georgia,” 617.

80 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 274–76.

81 A new voyage to Georgia: By a young gentleman […], 2nd ed. (London, 1737), 40–41; An Extract from the Journal of Mr. Commissary Von Reck and of the Rev. Mr. Bolzius […] (London, 1734), 12–15; Candler, Colonial Records 3:86, 382.

82 Moore, Francis, A voyage to Georgia: Begun in the year 1735 […] (London, 1744), 31Google Scholar.

83 Williams, Julie Hedgepeth, The Significance of the Printed Word in Early America: Colonists’ Thoughts on the Role of the Press (Westport, 1999), 44Google Scholar; Coulter, E. Merton, ed., The Journal of Peter Gordon, 1732–1735 (Athens, 1963), 24, 2526Google Scholar.

84 Candler, Colonial Records 5:38; see also 39, 208, 224.

85 Tailfer, Patrick, Anderson, Hugh, and Douglas, David, A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia […] (Charles Town, 1741)Google Scholar, 26, 37 (“large Hill”), 69. On the “Malcontents” who advocated implementing a system of enslaved labor, see Pressly, Colonial Georgia, 27–32; Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 290–91. Candler also uses the term in his indexes to characterize these settlers; Candler, Colonial Records 5:227–28.

86 Stephens, Thomas, A Brief Account of the Causes that Have Retarded the Progress of the Colony of Georgia in America (London, 1743), 8Google Scholar.

87 Stephens, A Brief Account, 8.

88 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 290. The case was taken to trial, but was dismissed as the jury did not believe the allegations against the attackers.

89 Candler, Colonial Records 22:77–78, 229.

90 For example, see Tailfer, Anderson, and Douglas, True and Historical Narrative, 29, 66, 30; Potter, David M. Jr., “The Rise of the Plantation System in Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 16, no. 2 (June 1932): 114–35Google Scholar, at 114.

91 Candler, Colonial Records 3:14–15, 17, 51–52, 86, 169; Spalding, Oglethorpe in America, 43; Pressly, Colonial Georgia, 25; Taylor, Alan, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York, 2001), 241Google Scholar.

92 In contrast, indigo would soon make its way to South Carolina and develop into a large-scale industry dependent on enslaved labor. Rembert, David H. Jr., “The Indigo of Commerce in Colonial North America,” Economic Botany 33, no. 2 (April–June 1979): 128–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feeser, Andrea, Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life (Athens, 2013), 7879Google Scholar, 83–84, 102–3, 105; Morgan, Philip, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low-Country (Chapel Hill, 1998), 222Google Scholar; Anishanslin, Zara, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven, 2016), 101–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Candler, Colonial Records 1:362–63, 556.

94 Candler, Colonial Records 3:59–60; 21:346.

95 Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 291–92.

96 Taylor, American Colonies, 243; McIlvenna, Free Georgia, chap. 6.

97 Candler, Colonial Records 2:338; Holland, “Public Agricultural Experimentation,” 293–94, 296–97. On the site's more recent history and redevelopment, see Bill Dawers, “Hotels, Stores and Condos May Sprout at Trustees,” Savannah Morning News, 15 July 2001, 2D; Gail Krueger, “Historic Building Collapse,” Savannah Morning News, 1 September 2001, 1A; Gail Krueger, “How the Garden Grows,” Savannah Morning News, 16 September 2001, 10D; Mary Landers, “Trustees’ Garden: Site Cleanup Resumes,” Savannah Morning News, 22 August 2002, 1C; Mary Landers, “Trustees’ Garden Sprouts Again,” Savannah Morning News, 5 June 2008, C1; “Vision Comes to Life at Trustees’ Garden Site,” Savannah Morning News, 10 April 2018, A10.

98 Other examples include Drayton, Nature's Government; Grove, Green Imperialism; Desmond, Ray, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens (London, 1995)Google Scholar; Arnold, “Plant Capitalism”; Schiebinger, Plants and Empire. On current thinking regarding the continued use of distinctions between center and periphery, see also Parrish, Susan Scott, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar.

99 Arnold, “Plant Capitalism,” 911. In general, this was a time when science became detached from its old patrons, the churches and courts, and attached to the institutions of mercantile capitalism, the state, and trading companies; see Sörlin, “Ordering the World,” 69.

100 Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 76.

101 Charters, Welfare of the British Armed Forces, 3–6, 153, 174.

102 The National Archives, CUST 3; Navy Stock Accounts, MS 8225, SA. The plantation complex constituted perhaps the principal destination for British medicines during this period; see Dorner, “Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals,” chap. 4.

103 Many companies tried to force practitioners back into their membership in this period. See Berlin, Michael, “Guilds in Decline? London Livery Companies and the Rise of a Liberal Economy, 1600–1800,” in Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. Epstein, S. R. and Prak, Maarten (Cambridge, 2008), 316–41Google Scholar.

104 Copy of a paper delivered the Earl of Macclesfield, 1753, M5, SA. On its early membership and legal status, see Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, chap. 1; Barrett, C. R. B., The History of the Society of Apothecaries of London (London, 1905), xixxxxixGoogle Scholar, chap. 1.

105 List of Money Paid to Support the Chelsea Physic Garden, 20 March 1753, M5, SA; List of Benefactors to the Society, 1621–1759, box 39/4, SA; John Haynes, The Physic Garden, Chelsea: a plain view, 1751, L0047939, Wellcome Library London.

106 Kalm, Visit to England, 111.

107 Copy of a paper delivered the Earl of Macclesfield, 1753, M5, SA. Parker had served in parliament in the 1720s, and in 1752 was elected president of the Royal Society. A. M. Clerke, s.v., “Parker, George, second earl of Macclesfield (c.1697–1764),” ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/21299.

108 Crawford, Andean Wonder Drug, 67. Recent scholarship has emphasized the social embeddedness of scientific practice, as well as the frameworks of patronage systems, state power, and categories of difference that shaped the daily activities of natural history. See Sörlin, “Ordering the World,” 53–54.

109 Navy Stock Accounts, MS 8225, SA; Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 174.

110 Bengal General Letter, 21 November 1766, IOR/E/4/618, fols. 467–68, British Library; Fort William to Court, 28 November 1766, in C. S. Srinivasachari, ed., Fort William-India House Correspondence, vol. 4 (Delhi, 1962), 444.

111 John Raithby, ed., “An Act for encouraging the Cultivation, and for the better Preservation of Trees, Roots, Plants and Shrubs, 6 Geo. 3, c. 36,” The Statutes at Large of England and of Great-Britain, vol. 12, From 1 George III AD 1760 to 7 George III AD 1767 (London, 1811), 533–34; Wulf, Andrea, The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession (London, 2009), 136–37Google Scholar, 166.

112 Garden Committee Minute Book, 1769–1788, 30 November 1770, 84–85, MS 8228/2, SA.

113 Hunting, Society of Apothecaries, 134–35; Wulf, Brother Gardeners, 191, 198. On Banks, see Drayton, Nature's Government, xiii–xvi. For the case of economic botany in the Spanish Atlantic context, see, for example, Bleichmar, Daniela, “Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. Delbourgo, James and Dew, Nicholas (New York, 2008), 225–52Google Scholar; De Vos, Paula, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 209–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114 Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 76.

115 Banks remained a lifelong supporter of the botanical work occurring at Chelsea. He donated to the garden hundreds of samples collected on his voyages—five hundred kinds of seeds in 1781 alone. Drewitt, Frederic Dawtrey, The Romance of the Apothecaries’ Garden at Chelsea (London, 1922), 6972Google Scholar; Godfrey, “Paradise Row,” 15–22; Gascoigne, Joseph Banks, 76; Garden Order Book, 1771–1829, 8, 25–26, MS 8236, SA; Garden Committee Minute Book, 1769–1788, 106–7, 145–47, 213–15, 232, MS 8228/2, SA; Stearn, William T., “Miller's Gardeners Dictionary and Its Abridgement,” Journal of the Society for Bibliography of Natural History 7, no. 1 (July 1974): 125–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 138. Recent work has emphasized the influence of Banks's local concerns on his global pursuits, namely Hoppit, Julian, “Sir Joseph Banks's Provincial Turn,” Historical Journal 61, no. 2 (2018): 403–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116 The British government appointed John Ellis (Fellow of the Royal Society) royal agent in West Florida when it acquired the colony in 1763. In addition to his duties overseeing crown allocations, Ellis employed local botanists to collect plants in the former Spanish territory, which he successfully, unlike Robert Millar, sent back to England. He had also collaborated with Henry Ellis (1721–1806), an early governor of Georgia, to send seeds to the new royal colony during the 1750s. Groner, Julius and Rea, Robert R., “John Ellis, King's Agent, and West Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 66, no. 4 (April 1988): 385–98Google Scholar; Rauschenberg, Roy A., “John Ellis, Royal Agent for West Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (July 1983): 124Google Scholar; Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 333–36.

117 Georgia Gazette, 10 January 1765, 24 January 1765, 11 April 1765; 17 January 1770, 25 April 1770; Augusta Chronicle, 12 May 1792.

118 Argo Roersch van der Hoogte and Toine Pieters, “Science in the Service of Colonial Agro-Industrialism: The Case of Cinchona Cultivation in the Dutch and British East Indies, 1852–1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47, part A (September 2014): 12–22; Goss, Andrew, The Floracrats: State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the Enlightenment in Indonesia (Madison, 2011)Google Scholar; Drayton, Nature's Government, 207–20; McCracken, Donal P., Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (London, 1997)Google Scholar, chap. 3.

119 James Anderson to Governor and Council of Madras, 17 November 1789, IOR/P/241/15, fols. 3185–87, British Library. See also Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany, 1996), 166–68; Arnold, “Plant Capitalism,” 911.

120 The first garden at Kew was founded in 1759 to house the royal plant collection. By the Victorian era, it had shifted from a pleasure garden to a research center staffed by professional botanists. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, 3–5, 7; Mackay, David, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780–1801 (New York, 1985), 193Google Scholar; Drayton, Nature's Government, 48–49, 106, 116–17. On the further development of Kew, see Endersby, Jim, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago, 2008)Google Scholar.

121 Charters, Welfare of the British Armed Forces, 16; Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine, 64, 76.

122 Carman, Harry J., ed., American Husbandry, 1775 (Port Washington, 1964), 193–94Google Scholar, 196–97.

123 This was not the case initially as cotton seeds play no special role in quintessential nineteenth-century accounts of the garden. Faulkner, Thomas, An Historical and Topographical Description of Chelsea and Its Environs (London, 1810), 22Google Scholar; Field, Henry, Memoirs, Historical and Illustrative, of the Botanick Garden at Chelsea (London, 1802)Google Scholar; Blunt, Reginald, Paradise Row or a Broken Piece of Old Chelsea (London, 1906)Google Scholar.

124 Drewitt, Romance of the Apothecaries’ Garden, 58. This version of events is preserved in a new edition of Drewitt's book published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 (p. 66). See also Arthur W. Hill, “The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens,” Annals of Missouri Botanical Garden 2, nos. 1/2 (February–April 1915): 185–240, at 212; Wheelwright, Edith Grey, The Physick Garden: Medicinal Plants and Their History (New York, 1935), 142Google Scholar.

125 For example, see Winn, Christopher, I Never Knew That about London (London, 2012), 176Google Scholar; Tames, Richard, London: A Cultural History (Oxford, 2006), 20Google Scholar; Oakes, George W. and Chapman, Alexandra, Turn Right at the Foundation: Fifty-Three Walking Tours through Europe's Most Enchanting Cities (London, 1996), 42Google Scholar.

126 The species of cotton familiar to North Americans most likely came from South America, southern Mexico, and the West Indies. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 154n29; Brand, Donald D., “The Origin and Early Distribution of New World Cultivated Plants,” Agricultural History 13, no. 2 (April 1939): 109–17Google Scholar, at 114; Stephens, S. G., “The Origin of Sea Island Cotton,” Agricultural History 50, no. 2 (April 1976): 391–99Google Scholar, at 391–95. For a more up-to-date description of the rise of cotton in the American South, see Chaplin, Joyce E., “Creating a Cotton South in Georgia and South Carolina, 1760–1815,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 2 (May 1991): 171200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127 Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014), 101Google Scholar.

128 Grove, Green Imperialism, 336–37; see also Arnold, “Plant Capitalism.”