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Atlantic Studies
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To cite this Article Crawford, Matthew James(2010) 'A “reasoned proposal” against “vain science”: Creole negotiations of
an Atlantic medicament in the Audiencia of Quito (1776-92)', Atlantic Studies, 7: 4, 397 — 419
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2010.516191
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Atlantic Studies
Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2010, 397419
*Email: mcrawf11@kent.edu
ISSN 1478-8810 print/ISSN 1470-4649 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2010.516191
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398 M. J. Crawford
America.3 Spanish royal pharmacists and other medical practitioners in the Atlantic
world were interested in quina on account of its ability to treat periodic fevers one
of the most prevalent ailments in the early modern period.4 At the time, Spain’s
Viceroyalties of New Granada and Peru were the only places in the world to find the
cinchona tree, from which the bark was harvested. While the trees could be found in
Andean forests throughout South America, most people, including physicians and
pharmacists in Europe and the Americas, thought that the best bark came from
Loja.5 Thus, the Crown focused its monopoly exclusively on quina from Loja, leaving
the majority of bark from New Granada and Peru to be harvested and traded
throughout Spanish America and the Atlantic by Spanish and Creole merchants and
landowners.
In a 1779 report on the quina trade and the royal monopoly prepared for José
Garcı́a de León y Pizarro, the Visitador General in Quito, Miguel Garcı́a de Cáceres,
a customs official in Guayaquil, reinterpreted the significance of the samples that
Valdivieso sent to Madrid in 1769.6 The utility of this powdered bark was not that it
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received ‘‘repeated praises’’ in Spain and represented a possibly more secure way of
transporting the bark.7 In Cáceres’ view, the true utility of Valdivieso’s bark samples
was that they provided a ‘‘subtle method’’ for exposing the ‘‘vain science’’ of
‘‘Experts’’ in Spain and Europe.8 As it turns out, Valdivieso’s powdered quina was
made of a type of bark that many in Europe considered inferior, if not useless.9 And
so, the praise for the bark in Spain seemed misplaced.
Cáceres used this episode to highlight a fundamental problem with the under-
standing of quina promulgated by ‘‘experts’’ in Spain and Europe. In particular,
Cáceres cast European science as ‘‘vain’’ because he thought that chemists, botanists,
physicians, and pharmacists focused erroneously on aesthetic qualities of quina, such
as its coloration, odor, and flavor.10 Many in Europe and elsewhere in the Atlantic
used such characteristics to determine the therapeutic efficacy and commercial value
of any given sample or shipment of the bark. Cáceres rejected this approach as a
result of years of experience with the quina trade in which he witnessed and heard
about how easily buyers, especially in Europe, mistook or were tricked into mistaking
bad bark for good. From his perspective, variations in the quality and efficacy of
different varieties of quina were not drastic enough to be detectable by the sciences of
the time.11 Consequently, he argued that all quina had more or less equal therapeutic
utility, unless it had begun to rot. Thus, European assessments of different kinds of
quina based on physical qualities and their desire to identify the best bark seemed to
have more to do with ‘‘caprice’’ than knowledge.
Throughout his report, Cáceres often targeted ‘‘the learned’’ of Europe as the
purveyors of this ‘‘vain science.’’12 And he was not wrong to single out Europeans.
But he was not entirely right either; medical practitioners and merchants throughout
the Atlantic world assessed samples and shipments of quina based on its physical
characteristics and Cáceres, a customs official, would have known that.13 His
characterization of such knowledge and practices as primarily European reflects
intention rather than ignorance.
Such critiques of European claims and theories about American nature by native-
born American writers and thinkers were prevalent in colonial Spanish America in
connection with a burgeoning Creole patriotism. In the late eighteenth century, the
fear of political, economic, and cultural dispossession, which Creole elites had
harbored since at least the seventeenth century, intensified against the background of
Atlantic Studies 399
the Bourbon Reforms during the reigns of Charles III (175988) and Charles IV
(17881808).14 This reform program involved efforts by the Crown and its ministers
to increase royal power and intensify exploitation of American natural resources
while renewing efforts to exclude Creoles from the offices of colonial governance.15
Even though the main goal of demoting the American territories from quasi-
autonomous kingdoms to subservient colonies remained elusive, many Creoles still
understood these new imperial policies as attacks on their social, political, and
economic status. The situation was further exacerbated by the publication of
historical and philosophical works by Cornelius de Pauw, Guillaume-Thomas
Raynal, William Robertson, and others, which argued that the New World climate
had a degenerative effect on American fauna (including human beings).16 Moreover,
many of these works denied the utility and authority of indigenous and Creole texts
and intellectual traditions for writing the history of the New World.17 Thus, Creoles
faced cultural and epistemological dispossession as well as political and economic
dispossession.
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those scientific and medical practitioners who claimed that they could distinguish the
medical efficacy of different kinds of quina. He also used this approach to critique
anyone who made claims about quina without first-hand experience of the Andean
forests where the cinchona tree was found. It was, thus, a critique that could apply to
any armchair scientific or medical writer, regardless of geographical location. Yet,
Cáceres’ critique was not just epistemological. It also undermined the basic premise
of the royal monopoly of quina that bark from Loja could be identified as the best.
Yet, surprisingly, his recommendation to the Visitador General in Quito was not to
disband the monopoly but to expand it to include most, if not all, of the cinchona
forests of South America. Here, Cáceres parted ways with those Creole elites in the
Audiencia of Quito who viewed an extension of the royal monopoly as an
unnecessary and unwanted intrusion into the local economy. Nonetheless, he
developed and deployed his critical epistemology in reference more to local political
and economic debates than to the broader continental and transatlantic contexts in
which Creole patriotism and patriotic epistemology operated.
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This is not to say that patriotism was irrelevant, but to emphasize that patriotism
was not the primary frame of reference when significant local divisions existed among
Creole elites over the understanding and use of natural resources. It is tempting to
overemphasize the importance of Creole patriotism, especially with cases, like quina,
in which local outcomes have transatlantic and even global consequences. When
viewed from the perspective of the local discourse of Creole merchants, landowners,
and government officials, Cáceres’ characterization of European science as ‘‘vain
science’’ looks more like a rhetorical tool deployed in support of his political and
economic agenda to protect cinchona trees from overharvesting. Cáceres, according
to available documents, grew up in Jaen de Bracamoros, one of many small towns in
southern New Granada that relied on cinchona bark as their primary link to the
networks of Atlantic commerce.21 And, as a former governor of Jaen, he knew full
well that if the trees disappeared, places like his hometown would not be far behind.
Undoubtedly, patriotic sensibilities gave force to his critique of European science, but
they do not tell the whole story. More than an obscure document from a corner of
the Spanish Empire, Cáceres’ report and its connection to local debates about quina
provides crucial insight into the complex and intense interactions of local political
interests, patriotic epistemologies, and imperial policy in the production of natural
knowledge in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.22
When Garcı́a Pizarro arrived in Quito, he embraced all aspects of his post with
zeal and dutifully began collecting information on the quina trade. In addition to
consulting earlier reports on the monopoly, Garcı́a Pizarro ‘‘endeavored to speak,
confer, and treat of this important [issue], not only with Merchants but also the
Porters [Portadores], or harvesters as we call them, who transport [the bark] to
[Guayaquil].’’ He also collected samples of ‘‘the most useful species.’’25 In such
instances, Garcı́a Pizarro embodied the privileging of empirical observations that
pervaded the Spanish imperial bureaucracy and its efforts to produce knowledge of
American nature.
Such activities eventually led Garcı́a Pizarro to Miguel Garcı́a de Cáceres, a
customs official in Guayaquil.26 Guayaquil was Quito’s primary port on the Pacific
coast, which connected the inland regions of northern Peru and southern New
Granada to the commercial networks of the Atlantic world via Lima. From his desk
overlooking the port in one direction and the forests of the Andes mountains in the
other, Cáceres was well positioned to comment on quina, one of the most important
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products of the region. Although biographical details on Cáceres are scarce, existing
documents suggest that he was a Creole born and raised in Jaen, a province also in
southern New Granada.27 Access to customs records in Guayaquil as well as his
previous position as governor of Jaen, a major quina-producing province in southern
New Granada, served Cáceres well in his objective of providing Garcı́a Pizarro with a
‘‘reasoned proposal’’ for reforming the royal monopoly of quina. In a letter to the
Minister of the Indies, Gárcia Pizarro described Cáceres as a ‘‘subject of
philosophical and natural knowledge, experienced in the commerce of this product,
and [in possession] of the greatest zeal for the service of the King.’’28
Cáceres proved to be a good choice. In less than a year, he produced one of the
most concise and trenchant analyses of the quina trade written by an official in New
Granada. In manuscript, the text ran to 13 folios. In the first 11 folios, Cáceres made
his case against European claims about quina, including several specific examples of
the various subterfuges perpetrated by officials and merchants involved in the quina
trade in the Audiencia of Quito. He followed this section with a list of five specific
recommendations for reforming the monopoly. On the last folio, Cáceres provided a
rough calculation of the principle expenses associated with harvesting and
transporting 400,000 pounds of the bark to Madrid annually. Ultimately, the report
was quite successful. It was distributed to most of the relevant offices in the imperial
government. Moreover, in 1786, the Crown issued printed copies of Cáceres’ report
and sent them back to the Viceroyalty of New Granada for further consideration by
officials in South America.29
Cáceres characterized his report primarily as a ‘‘reasoned proposal,’’ but it was
also a critique of the failure of los inteligentes [‘‘the learned’’], including chemists and
physicians in Spain, to produce knowledge useful to the Crown’s efforts to
monopolize quina. Such a claim made Cáceres’ report unique, since previous reports
on quina offered little explicit discussion of what was known about the bark and how.
Since he emphasized the connection between knowledge of the bark and its
commercial value, Cáceres was especially troubled by what he considered to be the
pernicious effects of erroneous claims made about cinchona bark, especially those
made by Europeans. From Cáceres’ perspective, some experts in Europe and
America, who pontificated about quina without direct experience with the cinchona
tree in its native habitat, lacked true knowledge of the bark. This misinformation, in
402 M. J. Crawford
turn, had adverse effects on the commercial appraisal of quina; some types of bark
were overvalued, while others were undervalued. Cáceres considered such mischar-
acterizations coming from ‘‘the learned’’ of Europe to be especially egregious, since
Europe was the main destination for quina from South America. Only with
knowledge of the bark’s true nature, Cáceres suggested, could the true value of
quina be established, and only observers in South America, he continued, could
provide such knowledge.30
Here, Cáceres’ report illustrates a key feature of the networks of knowledge
production constituted by many transatlantic imperial enterprises. Officials and
experts in Spain and South America could not impose their scientific and medicinal
knowledge on each other; instead they produced knowledge locally through the
interpretation and negotiation of the objects and information that moved along
Atlantic networks of trade and empire. Guayaquil, where Cáceres worked and
presumably wrote his report, was not just a port for exporting goods but also a
crucial node where information of European patterns of quina consumption brought
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The critique of ‘‘vain science’’ and local discourse in New Granada in the 1770s
While Caceres’ claims echoed the broader patriotic discourse of Creoles throughout
the Americas, his critiques owed more to a local critical discourse regarding quina
and its regulation that circulated in New Granada in the 1770s. Good examples are
found among the responses to a royal order sent to the Viceroy of New Granada in
January 1776 that solicited information on the quina trade and opinions about
reforming the royal monopoly.31 At the Crown’s behest, Viceroy Manuel Antonio
Flores (who was in office from 177681) convened the Junta General de Tribunales,
which, in turn, solicited reports from the President of Quito and other officials in
New Granada’s main quina-producing regions.32 Although the Junta had asked four
specific questions, many of the officials used the occasion to provide their general
observations and opinions on the topic.33
Many respondents expressed skepticism about several common claims about the
cinchona tree and its bark. In particular, they critiqued the European obsession with
the question of which quina was the ‘‘best’’ in terms of efficacy. Since the
establishment of the monopoly in 1751, officials in Spain, Peru, and New Granada
needed to know which was the best quina because they felt that it was not only fitting
but also a legal right for the Crown to monopolize this bark. For the most part,
physicians and pharmacists in Europe and America used the physical characteristics
of a shipment of quina to assess its medical utility. In examining any given shipment,
these experts looked for certain features of the bark a particular shape, smell, or
taste to determine if the bark was of sufficient quality for royal purposes. For many
others outside of the quina-producing regions, these techniques were the only means
to determine if a given quantity of quina would be safe to ingest and effective.
Several respondents to the Crown’s inquiry of 1776 pointed out the problems with
these techniques. For example, the Marquis de Villa Orellana, a quina merchant in
Atlantic Studies 403
from branches [canutillo] or thick bark from the trunk [costrón].’’ This issue was
especially important, since merchant ‘‘contracts’’ often specified the desired
thickness of the bark.35 From Carrión’s perspective, such contracts showed that
the commercial value of quina was not based on true knowledge, but consumer tastes.
Ultimately, the testimonies of the Marquis de Villa Orellana and Carrión
demonstrate the range of critical discourse circulating among the Creole elite of
the Audiencia of Quito.
In his ‘‘reasoned proposal,’’ Cáceres employed similar tropes. He first emphasized
that neither merchants nor ‘‘the learned’’ of Europe had established sufficient criteria
for assessing the quality of quina. Indeed, he characterized all previous assessments
of quina as being based on caprice rather than true knowledge. Here, he echoed
Carrión’s notion that true knowledge derived from empirical knowledge of the bark’s
essential qualities. In contrast to Carrión, however, who made a distinction between
merchants and scientific practitioners, Cáceres treated these two groups as equally
likely to make false claims about the bark, and often referred to them together, as
represented by his frequent references to ‘‘merchants and chemists.’’ He observed:
‘‘those that call themselves learned, as much from America as from Europe, approve
the same [quina] in the afternoon which they rejected in the morning.’’36 Such a claim
highlights the importance of local tensions among Creole elites alongside transat-
lantic tensions between Creoles and Europeans. In some instances, Cáceres makes
clear that his problem is with any expert who makes false claims about quina,
regardless of their geographical location. In other instances, he singles out European
experts because he recognized the influence that Europeans had as a major group of
consumers of cinchona bark at the time.
Cáceres did not reject all expert knowledge. He simply advised more skepticism in
evaluating claims about quina, especially those made by Europeans. He noted that
European tastes in quina had vacillated significantly in the first half of the eighteenth
century. What was considered the best bark in one decade was considered the worst
in the next. Such shifts in taste and demand suggested to Cáceres that distinctions of
the quality of quina had been ‘‘without any other fundamental [principle] than that of
the caprice of traders or the proportions of the [contracts] which [these traders] have
made in advance with the harvesters.’’37 Cáceres, thus, rejected a system in which
commerce was the sole determinant of the value of quina and the kind of quina
404 M. J. Crawford
He further supported his view by noting how easily bark collectors duped
unsuspecting merchants and consumers, and even pharmacists and physicians. Here,
Cáceres used the example of Pedro de Valdivieso, ‘‘Magistrate of the Forests’’ in Loja
and a trusted name in the quina trade. Valdivieso, Cáceres explained, did not share
the European bias against costrón that developed after 1750.43 Faced with dwindling
numbers of cinchona trees in the hills near Loja, Valdivieso had to find a way to
make thick bark acceptable to the royal pharmacists. So, in 1769, he sent his samples
of pulverized costrón in sealed bamboo tubes (known as Guayaquiles).44 In Spain,
Valdivieso’s powdered bark received ‘‘repeated praise’’ and was deemed ‘‘superior,’’
such that the Royal Pharmacy requested a portion of powdered bark to be included
with all future shipments.45 Cáceres explained: ‘‘[Valdivieso] found a subtle method
for selling these rejected [barks] in Spain.’’ Moreover, this case confirmed ‘‘the vain
science of those experts [in Spain].’’46 Ultimately, Cáceres argued, Valdivieso’s
samples showed that the royal pharmacists’ concern with the physical characteristics
of the bark was unfounded and suggested that many, if not all, of such characteristics
were unrelated to the therapeutic efficacy of any given sample of quina. Such
historical examples and anecdotal evidence served as the basis of Cáceres’
characterization of the knowledge of European chemists, physicians, and pharma-
cists as ‘‘vain science.’’ This evidence was also proof that these ‘‘experts’’ lacked
knowledge of those essential qualities that were the locus of the bark’s medical virtue
and instead focused on qualities that were merely accidental. This was ‘‘vain’’ science
because it only dealt in the physical features of the bark which, according to Cáceres,
were not indicators of its therapeutic utility.
This situation was not the product of simple ignorance, Cáceres noted. Rather, it
was a campaign of misinformation purposely perpetuated by ‘‘the learned’’ of
Europe. According to Cáceres, ‘‘disorder and disarray’’ in conjunction with
‘‘widespread and unencumbered commerce’’ in quina were ‘‘the primary origin of
all errors and damage [to the bark’s value].’’ He was so confident of the falsity of
European claims about how to assess the quality of quina that he suggested that even
Europe’s own ‘‘experimental physics’’ would prove that ‘‘the learned’’ were wrong.
So, why did ‘‘the learned’’ continue to cling to a system of evaluating the bark on its
physical characteristics when it was so obviously false? Cáceres blamed chemists.
‘‘Inattentive Chemists,’’ he wrote, ‘‘insist on undermining [such observations that all
Atlantic Studies 405
kinds of quina had equal medical utility] so that the relics of [their] verisimilitudes,
which they devised regarding the virtues discovered in this distinguished vegetable,
may persist in some form.’’47 Indeed, cases like Valdivieso’s samples of powdered
quina revealed that chemists’ claims were ‘‘verisimilitudes’’ rather than truths. In
particular, Cáceres accused chemists of promoting two false claims: (1) that different
kinds of quina had varying levels of medical efficacy; and (2) that they could identify
these differences.48 In the end, Cáceres came out as an opponent to ‘‘the learned’’ of
Europe and their ‘‘verisimilitudes’’ when he concluded that all quina had medical
efficacy and that it was impossible to determine which kind of bark was best.
Cáceres went on to suggest that chemists’ ‘‘naive preoccupations’’ with using
physical characteristics to assess quality derived from a desire to ‘‘profit from the bad
use which the [Spanish] Nation makes of such an exquisite treasure.’’ If a physician,
pharmacist, or chemist in Europe could convince his patients and patrons that they
knew how to identify the best bark from the worst, they could charge a higher price
for their quina or, at least, attract patients and patrons from a competitor down the
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The implications of his conclusions and recommendations were clear. With his
emphasis on direct experience of the forests, such criteria effectively excluded the
work of virtually all experts, European or otherwise, who had not traveled to the
forests of South America. Those people with experience in the forests and who
collected the bark instead of ‘‘the learned’’ were the only ones who could provide
the Crown with knowledge of quina.
Not surprisingly, Cáceres emphasized his own authority as someone with
experience of the Andean forests. To this end, he consciously turned away from
406 M. J. Crawford
the approach of ‘‘the learned,’’ which he described as ‘‘the path, which an error, as
vulgar as [it is] irrelevant and harmful, has blazed.’’ Instead he relied on ‘‘expertise
. . . acquired in the forests and the collection of [quina],’’ and the ‘‘other successes’’
that his ‘‘mode of thinking’’ had produced. This approach led him to the conclusion
that ‘‘among the [barks], which are truly from Quina Trees, there is very little variety
and substantial distinction regarding their specific virtues.’’ This conclusion meant
that the primary task should be ‘‘to distinguish that which is Quina’’ from ‘‘other
barks’’ so as ‘‘to avoid fraud.’’ As a corollary to his conclusion, he added:
neither physicians, nor pharmacists, nor those selfsame merchants, in whose knowledge
is invested nothing less than the security of their wealth, have not been able to account
for [the varieties of quina], which they have not recognized until recently, with constant
and true signs.
Just as the knowledge of merchants was biased and could not be trusted,
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physicians and pharmacists had failed to identify ‘‘constant and true signs’’ with
which to make distinctions between different kinds of bark in terms of quality and
efficacy.51
Cáceres and other critics in New Granada were, in short, making the case that
claims about cinchona bark made by those who had never visited the forests could
only provide false and ineffective premises for the royal monopoly. Vain attempts to
protect reputations and commercial entanglements had led to consumer tastes being
mistaken for true knowledge of the essential qualities of quina. At the same time,
Cáceres and others who had direct experience with the trees promoted themselves as
the real experts best positioned to produce true and useful knowledge of quina and
other American products. Moreover, Cáceres hoped that attributing more authority
to knowledge derived from experience would lead to a realignment of the commercial
value of quina according to true expert knowledge rather than consumer perceptions
and demand.
The problem of scarcity and the debate over the royal monopoly of quina
What motivated such assertions of the authority of the local over ‘‘the learned’’? One
explanation is that this move was consistent with the emphasis on empirical
observation that pervaded many Atlantic networks of knowledge production,
including Spanish imperial bureaucracy.52 Another explanation is that such critiques
reflect the interests of Creole elites in maintaining and increasing their influence on
imperial policies such as the royal monopoly of quina. If local officials in South
America could only make the case for their unique authority, they could claim a
greater role in imperial policy making regarding their local natural resources. These
two explanations are, in fact, complementary. This case demonstrates how an official
in Guayaquil co-opted the discourse of empiricism to bolster the authority of Creoles
like himself, who knew quina through experience of the trees and the forests rather
than through reports or just the bark. Ultimately, by emphasizing his authority vis-
à-vis ‘‘the learned’’ to make claims about the cinchona tree and its bark, Cáceres
increased the potential credibility of his ‘‘reasoned proposal’’ regarding the royal
monopoly of quina.
Atlantic Studies 407
Cáceres was not alone. Many bark collectors, landowners, merchants, and
government officials in New Granada had a vested interest in those royal policies
that could affect production and trade in one of the region’s most important export
commodities. For various reasons, an emerging coalition of individuals from these
interested groups became convinced that the problems with the quina trade required
the Crown’s intervention. By the 1770s, officials and bark collectors in several of the
quina-producing regions of southern New Granada had reported on the increasing
scarcity of cinchona trees. Pedro de Valdivieso in Loja was one of the first to become
aware of the impending scarcity of harvestable cinchona bark. When he became
‘‘Magistrate of the Forests’’ in 1768, he sent out several ‘‘explorers’’ to survey the
remaining stands of cinchona trees.53 All reported back that overharvesting had
decimated stands of cinchona trees, but several predicted that a small number of
immature trees would be ready for harvesting in three to five years. Valdivieso
promptly issued a decree prohibiting commerce in quina from Loja. It proved
ineffective and, in 1774, Valdivieso informed José Diguja, the President of Quito at
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the time, that he could no longer guarantee the availability of the quantities of bark
needed for the royal monopoly.54
Not surprisingly, scarcity was also a theme in the replies submitted to the Viceroy
of New Granada’s Junta General de Tribunales in 1776. Disagreement emerged
primarily among government officials, merchants, and landowners over the cause of
scarcity and, consequently, how to address it. One group of respondents sought a
local solution and encouraged the Crown to let the cabildos (town councils) and
alcaldes mayores (magistrates) in quina-producing provinces handle the problem
themselves. Another group of respondents sought greater royal intervention through
expanding and strengthening the royal monopoly. While both groups wanted what
was best for the local economies in southern New Granada, they disagreed on how to
achieve it.
One source of contention between these two groups was the system of extracting
the bark. Many merchants and hacendados, with the help of corregidores (provincial
governors) and alcades mayores (magistrates), employed a system of repartimiento to
provide incentives for seasonal laborers to harvest cinchona bark in the summer
months. Under the repartimiento, merchants advanced a certain amount of European
cloth, clothing, or manufactured goods to bark collectors in exchange for a specified
quantity of quina to be delivered at the end of harvesting season. By overvaluing the
goods that they sold and undervaluing the bark that laborers collected, corregidores,
hacendados, and merchants could manipulate the system to their advantage, often
with the help of church officials. As recent revisionist scholarship has suggested, the
repartimiento was not always exploitative and, in some cases, served crucial economic
functions like supplying credit, mitigating costs, and facilitating the enforcement of
contracts.55 Not surprisingly, many in the Audiencia of Quito rejected any policies,
including expansion of the royal monopoly, which undermined the repartimiento.
Some families in quina-producing regions, undoubtedly, wanted to maintain this
system because they viewed it as a means to perpetuate their position of privilege,
while others considered the repartimiento as a crucial element to the functioning of
the local economy.56 For critics of the repartimiento, however, expansion of the royal
monopoly was the key to dismantling this system and weakening those who
benefitted from it most. Under the monopoly, the Crown would pay cash to laborers
408 M. J. Crawford
upon delivery of the bark; thus, the need for the repartimiento would be eliminated
and money would be injected into the local economy.57
Yet, not everyone saw the royal monopoly as the appropriate means to bring the
system of repartimiento to an end. After all, many in the Audiencia of Quito thought
that private citizens had a right to trade quina without interference by the Crown.
These types of concerns were in line with a more general push for the liberalization of
trade throughout the Spanish Empire in the late eighteenth century.58 As a result,
some merchants and hacendados involved in the quina trade co-opted the discourse
of free trade as a means to support a status quo in which regulation by the Crown
was kept to a minimum. Supporters of the monopoly responded to such claims by
arguing that the fate of the cinchona trees should not be left in the hands of people
motivated by profit. Pro-monopoly writers often cast state regulation of quina as a
necessity for the protection of a public good and the welfare of humanity; in other
words, the Crown needed to protect the trees from merchant greed.59 Thus, the
debate over quina and the monopoly was entangled with the discourses of
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repartimiento, free trade, royal power, and the public good, as well as discourses of
patriotism and empiricism.
The replies of 1776 to the inquiry of the Junta General reflected many of these
concerns. Proponents of a local solution rejected royal interference through the
monopoly. For example, the Marquis de Villa Orellana suggested that, rather than a
monopoly, ‘‘appropriate licenses ought to be given to the town council [of Cuenca] to
conserve and increase’’ their cinchona forests.60 Nicolas Antonio de Carrión y Vaca
also framed the issue as a local problem: ‘‘the residents of Loja,’’ he observed, ‘‘have
destroyed the basis of their subsistence [quina] on their own volition.’’ Thus, the
problem, according to Carrión, required a local solution: the town council in Loja
should regulate harvesting by requiring bark collectors to obtain harvesting licenses
and to plant new cinchona trees in order to replace those destroyed in the process of
harvesting.61 In this way, local government could exert greater control over the
extraction and conservation of the bark.
For Orellana, Carrión, and others like them, the main goal was ‘‘free’’ trade, by
which they meant active exclusion of foreign merchants so that subjects of the
Spanish Crown could be ‘‘free’’ to compete within the empire. Carrión explained to
the Junta that there should be ‘‘free trade among Our [lands]’’ and a monopoly ‘‘with
regard to foreign Nations.’’ ‘‘Many private citizens of these [regions],’’ he continued,
‘‘have supported and clothed their children and servants by denuding the Trees of
Quina, especially since this Province is in the most extreme poverty such that money
is more an object of memory than of the eyes.’’ Here, he emphasized the centrality of
quina not just to ‘‘private citizens’’ but also to the local economy in general. Thus,
Carrión informed the Junta that the monopoly would be harmful to commerce and
that the regulation of quina was best left in the hands of local government. In order
to highlight the impracticality of the royal monopoly, he added: ‘‘it is difficult to put
doors on the countryside,’’ especially when ‘‘people who intend [to collect the bark]
will do so.’’62
Whereas opponents of the monopoly cast the problem of scarcity and its solution
as essentially the concern of local governments, supporters of the monopoly
portrayed the problem as a structural one requiring royal intervention. The persistent
poverty of quina-producing regions suggested that commerce was not as beneficial or
necessary as its supporters claimed. Loja was the iconic case: here was a region that
Atlantic Studies 409
the thick jungle, ‘‘escorting peasants [into the jungle] by armed guards,’’ ‘‘increasing
[the number] of day laborers,’’ and transporting from remote locations.67 This
possible future made the current policy of searching increasingly remote forests for
patches of cinchona trees untenable as well.
Cáceres concluded that scarcity required ‘‘an executive remedy.’’ He suggested
that the President of Quito enact a ‘‘general enclosure of all Forests in Provinces that
produce [the bark]’’ and prohibit any further harvesting and export of the bark by
private individuals. In addition, two government factories were to be set up one in
Guayaquil and another in Piura. Finally, he recommended that the King declare all
quina a ‘‘royal product’’ and make ‘‘the forests that produce it’’ common lands. Such
a move would block the machinations of the ‘‘powerful,’’ who purchase forests ‘‘with
the aid of [government officials] at negligible prices’’ in order to extract bark without
cultivating cinchona trees. Only royal intervention could put an end to such practices
that ‘‘deceive the King and harm the Public.’’68
Cáceres’ ‘‘executive remedy’’ already had support within the colonial government
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of New Granada. In writing to the Viceroy’s Junta General a few years earlier, both
Visitador General Garcı́a Pizarro and Francisco Antonio Moreno y Escandón, a
lawyer for the Audiencia of Santa Fé, expressed support for the monopoly option. In
particular, Moreno characterized the royal monopoly as a means to achieve ‘‘good
government’’ and avoid ‘‘the grave injuries caused by the disorder deriving from the
ambition of those who cut, mix, and transport [quina] indiscriminately for no other
reason than their own profit.’’69 ‘‘Free’’ trade had failed and now government
regulation was needed to stop the continued exploitation of the trees and bark
collectors by merchants and hacendados.
With these recommendations from Garcı́a Pizarro and Moreno, as well as the
testimonies from its 1776 inquiry, the Junta in Bogotá reached its decision. ‘‘The
establishment [of the monopoly],’’ it wrote in July 1777, ‘‘is not only useful but also
necessary to avoid fraud and the harmful consequences which disorder causes [such
as] clear cutting the Trees without the discretion and attentiveness that cutting for
conservation requires.’’70 While impending scarcity was a significant motivator, the
Junta’s own report made no mention of any concern for the exploitation of bark
collectors by merchants. Ultimately, the Junta declined to cite a specific cause of the
scarcity. Nonetheless, its final decision implied that the status quo exploitation of
the forests by merchants and hacendados was disordered and unsustainable. Thus,
when Cáceres submitted his report in 1779, the prospects looked good for his twin
goals of expanding the royal monopoly and increasing the influence over policy of
local experts with direct experience of the cinchona tree and its bark.
The matter did not end there, however. The Ministry of the Indies in Spain and its
associated bureaucracy were slow-moving institutions that in many cases took a
cautious approach to policy making. In 1786, officials in Spain printed a few copies
of Cáceres’ report and sent them to various officials in New Granada and Peru,
including the President of the Audiencia of Quito, for further consideration. Such a
move suggests that officials in Madrid took Cáceres’ recommendations seriously. Yet,
since nearly a decade had elapsed since he wrote his report, they also wanted to make
sure that his recommendations were still viable. Thus, rather than establishing
consensus about quina, the scarcity of cinchona trees, and the utility of the royal
monopoly, Cáceres’ report gave rise to additional debate among Creole elites and
Atlantic Studies 411
officials about how to understand and make the best use of this natural resource. One
final governmental report document will help to illuminate this process.
In 1792, officials in Quito turned to Francisco Javier Eugenio Santa Cruz y
Espejo (174795), a well-known mestizo savant, who not only had a medical degree
but also had experience debating legal and political matters. Historians characterize
Espejo as one of the key figures of enlightened thought and reform in Quito; and so,
he represented an important voice in the debate about the quina trade.71 Although
there is little information on Espejo’s personal or financial connections and ties to
quina, we do know that he shared Cáceres’ zeal for refuting medical and scientific
misinformation. Espejo agreed with Cáceres that various efforts to use certain
physical characteristics as indicators of the quality of quina were not based on ‘‘true
medical principles’’ but on ‘‘pure coincidence’’ or ‘‘the interests of merchants.’’72 In
contrast to Cáceres, Espejo thought that ‘‘botanists and physicians,’’ rather than
‘‘chemists,’’ had perpetrated such errors, and he argued that the source of ‘‘the
healthful effects of this [medicament]’’ would never be revealed through ‘‘persistent
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medical investigation.’’73 Whereas Cáceres used this conclusion to argue that the
Crown should monopolize all quina, Espejo made no such connection. In fact,
he saw no need to worry about scarcity or about making the harvesting of quina more
efficient and effective. He observed that cinchona trees could be found from Cape
Horn to Santa Fé de Bogotá. ‘‘By a conservative calculation,’’ he continued, ‘‘even if
everyone in South America together was engaged in the harvesting of quina, they
would always find work to do and there would be no lack of material to collect.’’74
For Espejo, while it was important to have accurate and reliable knowledge about
quina, he argued that the abundance of cinchona trees made the erroneous claims of
‘‘botanists and physicians’’ a moot point from the perspective of imperial policy.
Not surprisingly, Espejo rejected the ‘‘absolute prohibition’’ of harvesting quina
that an extension of the royal monopoly would entail and argued that such
prohibition would be ‘‘extremely harmful to the state in general.’’75 He explained
that, for lack of ‘‘other kinds of industry or commerce,’’ thousands of people
depended on the quina trade for their livelihood a claim that echoed the position
taken by some respondents to the inquiries of the 1776 Junta General in Bogotá. He
added that quina was not an appropriate product for a royal monopoly, especially
since the cinchona trees were dispersed throughout the Andean forests and officials
would have difficulty controlling production. In addition, the monopoly would be
vulnerable to merchant fraud and corruption of its officials activities that would
further decrease the effectiveness of the local institutions of imperial governance.
Finally, Espejo noted that quina was ‘‘indispensable’’ for treating periodic fever and
other kinds of fever. In Espejo’s view, while monopolies of luxury items such as
cinnamon or tobacco were appropriate, a state monopoly of a necessity like quina
was not.76
Espejo also rejected the assumption that the royal treasury would derive equal
profits from the sale of quina as private traders. He even suggested that eventually the
cost of harvesting the bark would become too onerous. Regarding Cáceres’ report,
Espejo thought that his calculations of economic benefit were too optimistic, and he
characterized Cáceres’ projection of increasing scarcity as ‘‘an irrational panic
derived from his preoccupation with the monopoly.’’77 Thus, Espejo rejected the idea
that Cáceres provided a ‘‘reasoned proposal’’ derived from his intimate knowledge of
the forests and his experience with the cinchona tree. Instead, Espejo suggested that
412 M. J. Crawford
Cáceres committed the same error as those whom he critiqued. While Cáceres may
have been correct about the equal efficacy of the various kinds of quina, according to
Espejo, Cáceres’ claim about the scarcity of cinchona trees derived more from his
interests than his experiences.
Conclusion
Miguel Garcı́a de Cáceres displayed much prudence in his ‘‘reasoned proposal’’ to
José Garcı́a de León y Pizarro in 1779. He mobilized prevailing notions of the
authority of empirical observation and rising concerns about the scarcity of cinchona
trees to support his case for expanding the royal monopoly of quina. Since its
inception in 1751, the monopoly had been the subject of much debate among bark
collectors, merchants, and landowners in the quina-producing regions of southern
New Granada and northern Peru, and among government officials throughout the
Spanish Empire from cabildos in South America to the Crown in Spain. Amidst the
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government had to recognize that local officials and informants in South America
played a crucial role in collecting information, understanding the problems in the
quina trade, and recommending solutions. Indeed, for a time, local experts in the
Audiencia of Quito enjoyed a privileged place as authorities on the cinchona tree, its
bark, and the quina trade as evidenced in the long career of Pedro de Valdivieso in
Loja and the decision by officials in Quito to seek advice from Eugenio Espejo in
1792.
At the same time, however, local experts had to accommodate increasing
interactions with botanists another group of ‘‘the learned’’ of Europe. In the
second half of the eighteenth century, Spanish botanists began to play a larger role in
imperial governance as reflected by the many instances in which Casimiro Gómez
Ortega, Director of the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid, consulted with José de
Gálvez, Minister of the Indies, on matters relating to American flora. Botanists
received another powerful endorsement when the Crown approved and patronized
two botanical expeditions to South America one to Peru and Chile (177788) and
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank members of the 2009 International Seminar on the History of
the Atlantic World at Harvard University for their feedback on an earlier version of this
article, as well as Kevin Adams, Kelly Wisecup, Neil Safier, and the anonymous reviewers for
their comments and suggestions. Research for this article was supported by a fellowship from
414 M. J. Crawford
the J. William Fulbright Foundation (Spain) and research grants from the Institute for
International and Comparative Area Studies at the University of California, San Diego and
from the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego (NSF Grant
SES-0349956: Proof, Persuasion, and Policy: A Research and Training Grant for the UCSD
Science Studies Program).
Notes on contributor
Matthew James Crawford is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Kent State
University and the 20102011 Herdegen Fellow in the History of Scientific Information at the
Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA.
Notes
1. On the history of quina in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Jarcho,
Quinine’s Predecessor.
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13. Which characteristics were tested and the value assigned to them differed from place to
place.
14. See Brading, First America, 16, and Pagden, Spanish Imperialism, 91116.
15. For a recent contribution to and overview of scholarship on the Bourbon Reforms, see
Paquette, Enlightenment.
16. See Pauw, Recherches philosophiques; Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique; and
Robertson, History of America.
17. See Gerbi, Dispute.
18. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write.
19. See Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘‘Chivalric Epistemology’’ and ‘‘New Worlds, New Stars.’’
20. See Achim, ‘‘Making Lizards into Drugs’’; Aguila, ‘‘Estrategias’’; De Vos, ‘‘From Herbs
to Alchemy’’; and Lafuente, ‘‘Enlightenment.’’
21. See Moya Torres, El arbol and Contreras, El sector exportador.
22. For a recent overview of current scholarship on the Atlantic history of science, see
Delbourgo and Dew, Science and Empire.
23. Andrien, Kingdom of Quito, 190. For more on the visita of Garcı́a, see Andrien, ‘‘Politics
of Reform.’’
24. Garcı́a Pizarro to Gálvez, fol. 175r.
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40. Bark collectors responded in one of two ways: they either stopped collecting thick bark or
started shaving down the thick bark that they collected.
41. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 184rv.
42. Many experts in Europe not only considered acidity, bitterness, and the presence of resin
to be characteristics of good-quality bark, but some experts suggested that these three
qualities were also the locus of the bark’s medicinal virtue. Yet, in Cáceres’ view, further
testing of costrón would reveal that thick bark has ‘‘more acidity and more bitterness’’ as
well as more ‘‘glutinous humor’’ than thin bark. See Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 184v. Thus,
based on their own criteria for assessing the bark, Europeans had no basis for their bias
against costrón. See Maehle, Drugs on Trial.
43. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 184v. Valdivieso had previously tried to convince José Diguja,
the President of Quito, of the utility of costrón. See Diguja to Valdivieso, fol. 194v.
44. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 184v.
45. Cáceres provides these details in his report. Yet, available shipping records for the
monopoly from the period after 1769 do not indicate that Valdivieso continued to send
powdered bark. However, other contemporary sources suggest that some private
merchants brought small amounts of powdered bark and quina extract to Europe. See
Ruiz, Compendio historico-medico comercial, 1057.
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