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Atlantic Studies
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A “reasoned proposal” against “vain science”: Creole negotiations of an


Atlantic medicament in the Audiencia of Quito (1776-92)
Matthew James Crawford

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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
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Atlantic Studies
Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2010, 397419

A ‘‘reasoned proposal’’ against ‘‘vain science’’: Creole negotiations of an


Atlantic medicament in the Audiencia of Quito (1776 92)
Matthew James Crawford*

This essay discusses the 1779 report on quina by Miguel Garcı́a de Cáceres, a
customs official in Guayaquil, for the Visitador General to the Audiencia of
Quito. Quina, a medicinal tree bark, was an important export commodity in the
region which had been recognized since the mid seventeenth century by medical
practitioners throughout the Atlantic world as an effective treatment for periodic
fevers, one of the most prevalent ailments in the early modern world. In 1751, the
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Crown had established a royal monopoly of quina  a mechanism for asserting an


exclusive claim to annual shipments of quina from Loja, the province reputed to
produce the best bark. The remainder of quina was open to private harvesting and
trading. In the late 1770s, the Crown wanted to know if it would be useful and
profitable to expand its monopoly of quina. Cáceres was in favor of the proposed
expansion, but his final report provided much more than a simple policy
recommendation. In fact, the majority of his report was a critique of what he
called the ‘‘vain science’’ employed primarily, but not solely, by European
scientific and medical practitioners in the study of quina. He argued that this
‘‘science’’ produced ‘‘verisimilitude’’ rather than true knowledge, and that this
false knowledge had a negative impact on the quina trade and threatened the very
survival of the cinchona trees from which quina was harvested. More than a case
of Creole patriotic epistemology, this essay argues that Cáceres’ report demon-
strates how local debates among Creoles shaped the production of knowledge
about quina  an object that moved within overlapping transatlantic networks of
trade, empire, and science. Such entanglements of knowledge, politics, and
economics at the local level characterized many of the knowledge-making
enterprises in the early modern Atlantic world.
Keywords: Spanish Atlantic; Quito; quinine; quina; Creole partriotism; colonial
science; monopoly; Bourbon Reforms

In 1769, Pedro de Valdivieso, ‘‘Magistrate of the Forests’’ in the southern New


Granada province of Loja, sent two tubes of bamboo containing samples of
powdered quina, a medicinal tree bark, to the Royal Pharmacy in Madrid.1
Valdivieso’s main charge was to oversee the collection and preparation of annual
shipments of quina to the Royal Pharmacy. The samples submitted with the 1769
shipment were part of an experiment of sorts. Most quina was shipped to Europe as
pieces of dried bark rather than in powdered form. In an accompanying letter,
Valdivieso asked the royal pharmacists to determine if this powdered quina had
‘‘equal activity’’ therapeutically to that quina which arrived intact.2
All these activities occurred under the auspices of a royal monopoly of quina, a
mechanism through which the Spanish Crown claimed an exclusive right to annual
shipments of the highest quality and most efficacious bark available from South

*Email: mcrawf11@kent.edu
ISSN 1478-8810 print/ISSN 1470-4649 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2010.516191
http://www.informaworld.com
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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Much recent scholarship has enriched our understanding of the responses of


Creoles to the cultural and epistemological critiques that Europeans made under the
banners of historical and scientific inquiry. In an important study of historiography
in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has examined
how patriotism informed Creole responses to the disparaging remarks and theories
of Europeans.18 Focusing on the writings of Creole Jesuits, such as Francisco
Clavijero and Juan de Velasco, produced after their exile from the Spanish Empire in
1767, Cañizares-Esguerra argues that these writers and thinkers developed and
deployed a ‘‘patriotic epistemology’’ in which they emphasized their unique
authority as native-born Americans to know and interpret indigenous and Creole
historical records. The development of this epistemology was part of the larger
Creole project to appropriate Incan and Aztec cultural and intellectual traditions
while, at the same time, denying indigenous peoples a role in politics and overlooking
their contributions to the production of knowledge.19 Other studies have shown how
Creole practitioners of medicine and natural history in New Spain and New
Granada also rejected European claims and theories about American nature
including, for example, Linnaeus’ attempts to classify and characterize American
plants and animals according to his taxonomy. In these instances, Creoles rooted
their authority in their ability to observe and experience local American natural
phenomena directly  something that many in Europe could not and did not do.20
This essay adds to this existing literature by examining how a group of Creole elites
in the Audiencia of Quito mobilized notions of patriotism and critiques of European
science within local discourse regarding the production and regulation of quina in the
final decades of the eighteenth century.
When viewed from the perspective of patriotism alone, Cáceres’ report contains
an apparent contradiction: he critiques the vanity of European science and, at the
same time, recommends expanding the royal monopoly. This contradiction is
especially striking since many other Creoles cast European sciences and royal
monopolies as forces that threatened to dispossess them of their status. This tension,
then, undermines any effort to cast Cáceres’ report solely as a case of Creole
patriotism. Certainly, like many of his Creole contemporaries, Cáceres argued that
his direct observations of cinchona and other local flora gave him greater authority
than Europeans to speak about American nature. From this position, he refuted
400 M. J. Crawford

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

A ‘‘reasoned proposal’’ for the royal monopoly of quina


In 1778, José Garcı́a de León y Pizarro, a bureaucrat and reformer from Madrid,
arrived in the Audiencia of Quito to conduct a visita general. Spain’s Ministry of the
Indies, which oversaw all matters related to the governance of the American
territories, used visitas to monitor various local and regional jurisdictions through-
out the empire. Yet, Garcı́a Pizarro’s visita was much more than a routine inspection;
it was an occasion for reform. According to Kenneth Andrien, the main goals of the
1778 visita to Quito were to make the Audiencia ‘‘more centralized and efficient’’ and
to increase imperial revenue by levying new taxes, improving collection of existing
taxes, and imposing royal monopolies on products such as aguardiente (cane
liquor).23 As part of this reform program, Garcı́a Pizarro was ordered to pay
‘‘special attention’’ to reforming the Crown’s monopoly of quina.24
Atlantic Studies 401

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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by merchants and other transatlantic travelers intermingled with information about


the cinchona tree and its bark brought by traders and travelers from the Andean
highlands. Thus, the Audiencia of Quito emerges as a key center  among many  for
the production and negotiation of natural knowledge about the cinchona tree and its
bark.

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

Cuenca, argued that observable characteristics such as ‘‘curled shape’’ or a specific


color were merely ‘‘accidental’’ qualities of the bark and not indicators of the bark’s
essence or ‘‘virtue.’’34 Villa Orellana noted that characteristics like the shape, color,
and thickness of the bark were primarily the product of the manipulations of bark
collectors and so were ‘‘accidental’’ qualities rather than essential or natural ones.
Thus, in Villa Orellana’s view, those attempts to assess the bark on physical
characteristics were useless. Another respondent from Quito, Nicolas Antonio de
Carrión y Vaca, was more generous in his assessment of the use of physical
characteristics to assess the quality of the bark. He thought that many so-called
‘‘experts,’’ including those in Europe, used the wrong characteristics. ‘‘Quina of the
first class,’’ according to Carrión, was distinguished by several characteristics
including ‘‘a burnt color’’ on the inside, ‘‘a black exterior color,’’ a special type of
cracking indicating lack of humidity, breakage ‘‘like glass,’’ and a ‘‘rough and
granulated’’ texture. Where the ‘‘experts’’ went wrong was in their emphasis on the
thickness of the bark, since it was still unclear ‘‘whether the best [quina] is thin bark
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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

considered the best fluctuated arbitrarily according to consumer demand.38 It was a


bold move, especially since such claims undermined the premise of the royal
monopoly that the Crown had an exclusive claim to the best bark.39
Costrón  a thick bark harvested from the trunk or fatter branches of the
cinchona tree  provided a good example. Recently, explained Cáceres, the ‘‘traders
of America’’ had developed a ‘‘total disdain’’ for the ‘‘trunks and thick branches’’ of
cinchona trees based on ‘‘reports made by the traders of Europe regarding the
circumstances and qualities that [quina] should have.’’ As a result, merchants in
South America would not buy thick bark at any price because they thought it was
‘‘useless.’’40 Cáceres contrasted this preference with ‘‘the early years’’ of the quina
trade when ‘‘considerable portions’’ of thick bark were sent to Spain for
consumption, and Europeans had as much esteem for costrón as ‘‘thin bark.’’41
What accounted for this reversal in the fortune of costrón? It was not, in Cáceres’
estimation, the result of any new knowledge, but rather the fickleness of European
consumers.42
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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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street. Moreover, their ability to distinguish different barks demonstrated their


authority in scientific and medical matters. Cáceres’ critique may sound a bit shrill,
but he was simply calling attention to the fact that the reputations and livelihood of
many of ‘‘the learned’’ in Europe depended on their ability to distinguish quina of
better quality and efficacy. He further added that the difficulty of many experts in
identifying and agreeing upon ‘‘the source,’’ with which to distinguish one type or
quality of quina from another, was evidence that ‘‘this procedure’’ of assessing the
medical efficacy of a shipment of bark based on physical characteristics was
not amenable to ‘‘the common rules of reason.’’49 Moreover, European experts
were unlikely to figure out what distinguished one quina from another because they
were focused on the bark’s physical characteristics  aspects of the bark that derived
value solely from commerce and not nature.
What mattered to Cáceres and others in Spanish America was the question of
who had the authority to make claims about quina and other natural entities. If not
chemists, physicians, or pharmacists, who could produce useful knowledge about
quina? Cáceres explained that the situation required ‘‘subjects of good judgment’’
who had ‘‘view[ed] the forests not just from the outside, but also travel[ed] deep into
the intricate bosom [of the forest] which is often almost impenetrable because of its
ruggedness.’’ In addition to empirical knowledge, such subjects should embrace

the spirit of rational curiosity [which] drives us to overcome the aforementioned


obstacles [such as the impenetrability of the forests] in order to gain practical knowledge
of the variety that exists [as much] among these trees and their qualities as among the
lands that produce them.50

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

produced a world-renowned and highly valued product but remained mired in


poverty. Miguel Sanchez Muñoz, a respondent from Cuenca, observed that recently
the people of Cuenca had ‘‘ambitiously’’ started harvesting quina. Instead of
economic benefit, this project resulted in a ‘‘grave prejudice to individual poor
people since subjects of quality and wealth have left this work to these unhappy
[people].’’63 Finally, Ignacio Checa, former corregidor of Loja, supported the
monopoly project precisely because it would dissolve the repartimiento system in
which merchants contracted with bark collectors to trade their undervalued bark for
overvalued goods, like clothing. In Checa’s estimation, since ‘‘[residents and natives]
would [collect the bark] for cash,’’ they would no longer harvest quina ‘‘in exchange
for overpriced clothing.’’64 Meanwhile, Miguel Sanchez Muñoz described a royal
monopoly of quina as ‘‘useful to the community especially to the helpless poor.’’65

From ‘‘executive remedy’’ to ‘‘irrational panic’’


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In light of widespread concern about scarcity, Cáceres’ epistemological critique takes


on added significance. Recall that he had faulted ‘‘the learned’’ of Europe and
America for ignoring the obvious conclusion that all quina had medical virtue. This
view had significant implications for imperial policy regarding the scarcity of
cinchona trees. He explained to Garcı́a Pizarro how greater utilization of the
knowledge of local experts in New Granada  that all quina had medical virtue 
ought to lead to readjustment of the value assigned to the bark in the Atlantic
economy. For example, he noted that merchants often required thin quina with a dark
exterior color. In addition, these merchants employed the force of local government 
via the repartimiento  by writing such specifications into their contracts with bark
collectors. As a result, bark collectors either discarded or modified that bark which
was too thin or too light in exterior color. Cáceres used such cases as examples of the
wastefulness produced by false characterizations of quina. Alternatively, duplicitous
bark collectors and merchants shaved down thick bark and exposed it to the sun to
darken its exterior color.
Cáceres suggested his conclusion that all quina had medical virtue as a means to
solve the problems of scarcity and fraud, if only the Crown and others would
embrace the view that physical characteristics were not indicators of quality. To make
the point, Cáceres provided some numbers. He noted that a ‘‘robust’’ cinchona tree
‘‘of regular stature’’ typically produced ‘‘five pounds of thin [bark]’’ and ‘‘ten pounds
of [thick bark].’’ Assuming a target quantity of 20,000 arrobas (about 500,000
pounds) of quina, he calculated that it would require the ‘‘destruction’’ of 100,000
trees if only thin bark were harvested, whereas harvesting both thick and thin bark
would require only 34,000 trees. ‘‘In order to satisfy the caprice of the merchants of
Europe,’’ he wrote, ‘‘66,000 [additional] trees are regrettably destroyed.’’66 He further
explained that if the requirement for a dark exterior were disregarded, the
destruction of an even fewer number of trees would be required.
Readjusting the values of merchants was only a partial solution to the problem of
scarcity. Cáceres reported that for every 1000 trees harvested, only 100 grew back and
developed ‘‘thick branches,’’ from which to harvest bark, after ‘‘many years.’’ The
numbers were clear. ‘‘If the present system of collection continues,’’ he wrote, ‘‘the
ruin of [quina is] inevitable.’’ Alternatively, he predicted that the price of the bark
would have to become ‘‘exorbitant’’ in order to cover the cost of ‘‘building roads’’ in
410 M. J. Crawford

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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various reports and recommendations produced during these decades of debate,


Cáceres’ 1779 report stands out because of its focus on knowledge as well as imperial
policy. He made not just economic arguments but also epistemological ones. Indeed,
more than half of his report focused on refuting erroneous claims about quina and
proposing firmer conclusions  based on first-hand experience  to serve as a
foundation for royal policies on the cinchona tree and its bark. Few commentators
on the quina trade within the Spanish imperial bureaucracy before or after Cáceres
gave such attention to what was known about the bark and how.
It is difficult to make a sharp distinction between Cáceres’ epistemological
critique and his policy recommendations regarding the monopoly, and that is why a
local, rather than transatlantic, frame of reference takes precedence here. From this
perspective, Cáceres’ rejection of the ‘‘vain science’’ of physicians, pharmacists,
botanists, and chemists resonated more with local debates about the production and
regulation of natural resources than with the larger phenomena of Creole patriotism
in Spanish America. Cáceres placed special emphasis on the false claims made by
Europeans, but he also recognized that merchants and some of ‘‘the learned’’ in
America made false claims too. In addition, while he may have known about the
larger ‘‘dispute of the New World’’ between native-born American and northern
European writers and thinkers, Cáceres did not need to look much further than
Guayaquil to find a vibrant critical discourse that engaged questions of epistemol-
ogy, economic policy, and imperial governance  all important themes in many other
venues around the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. Cáceres’ critique was
patriotic to the extent that he privileged the knowledge of those who had experience
of the Andean forests and the cinchona tree in situ. But in his emphasis on the royal
monopoly as the best solution to the problem of scarcity and a benefit to both the
Crown and the local economy, Cáceres diverged from those Creole elites who sought
to defend their place in Spanish colonial society by protecting the system of
repartimiento and keeping royal intervention to a minimum. Espejo was only half
right; Cáceres’ claims about quina drew on his experience and his interests.
Ultimately, Cáceres’ argument for local expertise was successful to some extent.
Although officials in Spain never gave up entirely on their goal of identifying and
acquiring the best bark for the Crown, scarcity became more of a concern. In
addition, these officials  in spite of their desire to limit the role of American elites in
Atlantic Studies 413

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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another in New Granada (17831810).78 Eventually, botanists came to occupy


crucial positions, even within the royal monopoly of quina; in the late 1780s, José
Celestino Mutis, Director of the botanical expedition in New Granada, was put in
charge of a new royal monopoly of quina established briefly in Santa Fé de Bogotá
and, in 1790, the Crown sent a Spanish botanist, Vicente Olmedo, to Loja to direct
the quina monopoly there. Thus, despite Cáceres’ warnings, the Crown continued to
engage ‘‘the learned’’ and the local simultaneously  except that, after going on a
botanical expedition, Spanish botanists could claim the one thing that Cáceres said
they lacked: experience of the Andean forests. Yet, even with greater involvement of
botanists from Spain, local networks of bark collectors, merchants, hacendados, and
government officials in the Audiencia of Quito continued to play a central role in the
production of knowledge about the cinchona tree and its bark.
We might suggest that the samples of powdered bark that Valdivieso sent to
Madrid in 1769 demonstrated neither the falsity of European knowledge nor the
veracity of local expertise in the Audiencia of Quito. Instead, they showed that while
the bark moved quite easily, knowledge did not. Just as the royal pharmacists in
Spain did not know the bark in the same way as the bark collectors did in the
Andean forests, Cáceres and others in New Granada did not know the bark in the
same way as pharmacists did at the Court in Madrid. Many of the localities
connected by the itineraries of this traveling tree bark constituted ‘‘centers of
calculation’’ where the juxtapositions and interactions of individuals, objects, and
information led to the production of knowledge.79 Cáceres’ report is irreducible to
Creole patriotism or patriotic epistemology alone because we find him and many of
his Creole contemporaries engaging a variety of practices and discourses in their
attempts to convert others to their vision of what constituted the best knowledge,
politics, and economics of the cinchona tree and its bark.

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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2. Valdivieso, ‘‘Factura instructiva.’’ Documents relating to the Royal Pharmacy’s evaluation


of this shipment are now lost.
3. The royal pharmacists used some of this quina to treat the royal family, while the Crown
gave it as gifts to Spanish and foreign dignitaries and distributed it to royal hospitals in
Spain.
4. The bark remained an important medical commodity in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as scientific and medical practitioners around the globe transformed quina into
quinine, an anti-malarial drug that facilitated European and American imperial and
commercial ventures and which remains an important tool in current efforts to eradicate
malaria worldwide. See Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion; Cueto, Cold War,
Deadly Fevers; Headrick, ‘‘Botany’’; and Slater, War and Medicine.
5. Relative to the royal monopolies of other natural products like tobacco and cochineal, the
quina monopoly was more limited in scope and left the majority of bark from New
Granada and Peru to be harvested by Spanish and Creole landowners and traded by
Spanish and Creole merchants in South America and throughout the Atlantic world.
Moreover, since quina grew in the wild rather than it being cultivated, the Crown would
have had difficulty even attempting to control all production and distribution of the bark.
The Crown’s only other efforts to regulate the quina trade were those policies and practices
that attempted to restrict the contraband trade in the bark perpetrated by British, Dutch,
and French merchants in the Caribbean and along the western coast of South America.
On other royal monopolies in colonial Latin America, see Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and
Markets and Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers.
6. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria.’’ This version of Cáceres’ report is a manuscript copy from the
original made in Quito on 16 March 1779.
7. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 184v.
8. Here, I translate Cáceres’ term ‘‘maestros,’’ which literally means ‘‘masters,’’ as ‘‘experts’’
because this term seems a better match in English for Cáceres’ intended meaning. See
Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 184v.
9. Cáceres’ characterization of Valdivieso’s duplicity will be discussed in full later.
10. Conversely, Spanish pharmacists considered the evaluation of such characteristics as
essential to their art. As late as 1814, Gregorio Bañares, Chamber Pharmacist to the King,
maintained: ‘‘in choosing exotic materials [for medicaments], it is necessary to consider
the color, odor, flavor, consistency and other physical characteristics directly.’’ See
Bañares, Filosofı́a farmacéutica, 2.
11. Cáceres accepted that variation existed between different kinds and sources of quina, but
did not accept that observable variations reflected variation in medical efficacy. He writes:
‘‘There is much variety observed between Quina trees such that they can be divided into
distinct classes but not into distinct species.’’ See Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 183r.
12. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fols. 181v, 184v.
Atlantic Studies 415

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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25. Ibid., fols. 175v176r.


26. Cáceres’ official title was Administrador Particular de Alcavalas y Aduana.
27. ‘‘Expediente seguido por Don Miguel.’’
28. Garcı́a Pizarro to Gálvez, fols. 177rv.
29. Cáceres, ‘‘Informe.’’
30. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 181r.
31. There were two separate orders promulgated in January 1776. The first order informed the
Viceroy of New Granada that all future shipments of quina (royal and private) must be
sent to Spain via Lima and its port, Callao. This order effectively created a bottleneck at
Callao through which all legal quina had to pass. Previously, merchants in New Granada
had had the option of shipping the bark north to the Isthmus of Panama via the port of
Guayaquil. See ‘ ‘‘Real Cedula’ to Manuel Antonio Flores’’ and ‘‘El Rey, ‘Real Cedula’ to
Virrey Governador.’’
32. ‘‘Junta General de Tribunales,’’ May 23, 1776. Transcriptions of all of the responses to the
Junta’s queries are all found in Cascarilla, box 1, expediente 11, Archivo Histórico
Nacional de Ecuador, Quito. Of the various reports, I make use of the following: Carrión y
Vaca, ‘‘Informe’’; Checa, ‘‘Informe’’; Sanchez Muñoz, ‘‘Informe’’; and Villa Orellana,
‘‘Informe.’’
33. The Junta had asked officials in the Audiencia of Quito to answer four specific questions:
(1) Was quina collected from cultivated trees on private haciendas or from trees growing in
the wild?; (2) How much bark did the respondent’s region produce annually and how long
after harvesting did it retain its potency?; (3) Was their quina available to ‘‘foreign
colonies’’ and, if so, how?; and (4) Would a royal monopoly of quina be beneficial or
harmful to the public and to commerce?
34. Villa Orellana, ‘‘Informe,’’ fol. 47v.
35. Carrión y Vaca, ‘‘Informe,’’ fols. 63v64r.
36. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fols. 181v, 184r.
37. ‘‘In the past,’’ Cáceres observed, ‘‘there have been various epochs of 10, 15, or 20 years in
which some kind of sudden shift has affected those Countries [i.e. Europe] in the
solicitation of all kinds of species of [quina] including [what they considered to be] the best
[species].’’ See Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 181v.
38. Cáceres and many of his contemporaries made no distinction between the price and value
of an object. Cáceres, apparently, characterized the value of objects like quina as an
objective quality that derived from their natural qualities or essence. From this
perspective, letting traders and merchants determine the value of quina based on
European demand created a disjunction between quina’s natural value and its market
value. Reformers like Cáceres supported the royal monopoly as a way to align the natural
and market values of cinchona bark.
39. See Crawford, ‘‘‘Para desterrar las dudas.’ ’’
416 M. J. Crawford

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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46. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 184v.


47. Ibid., fol. 186rv.
48. In order to further understand this critique, let us imagine a hypothetical set of
pharmacists at Cádiz charged with the task of inspecting quina shipments. Since all quina
had medical virtue, according to Cáceres, the pharmacist-inspectors should only try to
determine whether the bark was quina or not. Differences in the medical efficacy of
different kinds of quina were either negligible or undetectable. So, the pharmacist-
inspectors need not worry about evaluating the quality of the bark as long as it was,
indeed, quina. However, ‘‘chemists’’ perpetuated the myths that differences in the medical
virtue (quality) mattered and were detectable. As a result, the royal pharmacists continued
to test for the quality of quina.
49. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 186rv.
50. Ibid., fols. 182rv, 186r.
51. Ibid., fols. 186v187r.
52. On empiricism in the Atlantic, see Barrera-Osorio, ‘‘Empiricism’’; Barrera-Osorio,
Experiencing Nature, 110; and Parrish, ‘‘Diasporic African Sources.’’
52. Fondo Especial, vol. 67, no. 2858, Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador, Quito.
54. In reply to Valdivieso’s letter, Diguja asked if Loja’s forests could sustain yearly shipments
of 100 quintales (10,000 pounds) for the Royal Pharmacy. The answer was no. Valdivieso
explained to Diguja that his explorers of 1768 ‘‘spoke with little reflection’’ when they
suggested ‘‘the plants [i.e. cinchona trees] would be replaced in four to five years.’’ They
neglected, he continued, to account for ‘‘the many years needed for the bark to achieve
any substantial thickness.’’ See Valdivieso to Diguja, fol. 270rv.
55. See Baskes, ‘‘Colonial Institutions.’’
56. Moya Torres, El arbol, 78. Moya Torres argues that the repartimiento in the quina trade
was the means by which local families involved in the trade reproduced and perpetuated
their elite status.
57. See Andrien, ‘‘Noticias Secretas de America’’ and Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and
Markets, chap. 3.
58. See Fisher, Commercial Relations, and Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 6980, 14385.
59. An early proponent of this view was José Celestino Mutis. See Mutis, ‘‘Representación
hecha al Rey.’’
60. Villa Orellana, ‘‘Informe,’’ fol. 47r.
61. Alternatively, Carrión suggested that prisoners and vagabonds could learn the value of
work through forced labor on cinchona plantations. Carrión’s suggestions for plantations
were never implemented. See Carrión y Vaca, ‘‘Informe,’’ fols. 62r63v. However, a system
of government licensing of bark collectors did develop in the late 1780s and 1790s
throughout the Audiencia of Quito.
62. Carrión y Vaca, ‘‘Informe,’’ fols. 54v, 57r, 58r.
Atlantic Studies 417

63. Sanchez Muñoz, ‘‘Informe,’’ fol. 83v.


64. Checa, ‘‘Informe,’’ fol. 70v.
65. Sanchez Muñoz, ‘‘Informe,’’ fol. 83r.
66. Cáceres, ‘‘Memoria,’’ fol. 188bisr.
67. Ibid., fol. 189r.
68. Ibid., fols. 188bisv, 189v, 190rv.
69. Moreno y Escandón, ‘‘Vista del Fiscal,’’ fol. 144r.
70. ‘‘Junta General de Tribunales,’’ July 3, 1777.
71. See Freile Granizo, Eugenio Espejo.
72. Espejo, ‘‘Memoria,’’ 159.
73. Espejo, ‘‘Memoria,’’ 161.
74. Espejo, ‘‘Memoria,’’ 152.
75. Espejo, ‘‘Memoria,’’ 147.
76. Espejo, ‘‘Memoria,’’ 1534.
77. Espejo, ‘‘Memoria,’’ 163.
78. See Bleichmar, Visible Empire; Engstrand, Spanish Scientists; Nieto Olarte, Remedios para
el imperio; and Sota Rı́us, ‘‘Spanish Science.’’
79. See Latour, Science in Action, chap. 6.
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