People, Plants, and Medicine: Colonial Science and Medicine

Explores the global exchange of knowledge, technologies, plants, peoples, disease, and medicines. Considers primarily Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World but also takes examples from other knowledge traditions. Readings treat science and medicine in relation to voyaging, colonialism, slavery, racism, plants, and environmental exchange. Colonial sciences and medicines were important militarily and strategically for positioning emerging nation states in global struggles for land and resources.