Essay review: the fictive history of Victorian science and empire

In 1820 two French scientists - Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Jean Bienaimé Caventou - discovered and named the active alkaloid substance extracted from cinchona bark: quinine. The bark from the 'wondrous' fever tree, and its antimalarial properties, however, had long been known to both colonial scientists and indigenous Peruvians. From the mid-seventeenth century, cinchona bark, taken from trees that grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes, was part of a global circulation of botanical knowledge, practice and profit. By the 1850s, Europeans eager to bypass South American trade routes to access cinchona plants established plantations across the global South in French Algeria, Dutch Java and British India. Wardian cases - plant terrariums named after British physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward - would fuel new imperial efforts to curb malaria, contemporaries argued. And yet cinchona trees proved difficult to transport over land and sea, and did not easily or universally thrive in new tropical climates. As a result of the growing demand and uncertainty around cinchona, as Pratik Chakrabarti has argued, from the late eighteenth century there was 'a global scientific obsession' with finding a 'substitute' for cinchona, particularly local alternatives in India and China.