(Click the titles below to access the PDFs of the page proofs).
Semedo’s sixteen secrets: Tracing pharmaceutical networks in the Portuguese tropics
“By applying a long-standing European culture of medical secrecy to non- European remedies and natural knowledge, figures like Semedo helped initiate the global pharmaceutical trade – even as they nurtured persistent anxieties surrounding the commerce in and consumption of ‘drogas modernas’ that could not be fully integrated into Western medical practice.”
Published in Paula Findlen, ed. Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018).
Empires on Drugs Pharmaceutical Go-Betweens and the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance
“The drug trade comprised a vital epistemological link between the Portuguese and British dominions. As they exchanged pharmaceutical knowledge and materials, the merchants, healers, and cultivators in the Portuguese Empire established important contacts with networks of natural philosophers, including the Royal Society of London.”
Published in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ed. Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Drugs and Early Modernity
“Fundamental features of the early modern Atlantic – like the slave trade, the rise of experimental science and long-distance commerce, and the proliferation of religious confessions – were transnational in character. This essay surveys recent work in the field, emphasizing emerging scholarship on the hybrid nature of the Atlantic world.”
Published in History Compass, April, 2017.
“The Elks Are Our Horses”: Animals and Domestication in the New France Borderlands
“Domesticated animals – and the social practices that accompanied them – were central both to the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonizers and to indigenous American resistance. This paper examines these themes within the context of the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi region between 1670 and 1730.”
Published in The Journal of Early American History, Winter, 2013.
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o Man Is an Island: Early Modern Globalization, Knowledge Networks, and George Psalmanazar’s Formosa
“Although Psalmanazar was a fraud, his inventions about the island of Formosa circulated widely in different languages, nations, and inscriptive contexts. The divergence between Psalmanazar’s personal credibility and the longevity of his invented acts sheds light on the nature of evidence and information networks in early modern globalization.”
Published in The Journal of Early Modern History, Fall, 2013.
Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World (with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra)
“Fundamental features of the early modern Atlantic – like the slave trade, the rise of experimental science and long-distance commerce, and the proliferation of religious confessions – were transnational in character. This essay surveys recent work in the field, emphasizing emerging scholarship on the hybrid nature of the Atlantic world.”
Published in History Compass, Summer, 2013.
Portugal, Early Modern Globalization and the Origins of the Global Drug Trade
“The slaves, merchants and mariners of the Portuguese imperial world played a key role in bringing tea to Britain, coffee to Brazil, and chili peppers to India.”
Published in Perspectives on Europe, Spring, 2012.
Benjamin Breen 