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

Abstract

AbstractIn 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.