| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Londa Schiebinger. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 306. $39.95.
"We repair our Bodies with the Drugs of America," enthused Joseph Addison in his essay on "The Royal Exchange," and "repose ourselves under Indian Canopies" (The Spectator, May 19, 1711). For Addison, the advantages of commerce to a "barren uncomfortable Spot of Earth" such as Britain were obvious, and to be found in abundance in London, the "Emporium for the whole Earth." Here were all manner of luxuries, from silks and spices to exotic medicaments from the Orient and the New World. But one drug that would have been absent from Addison's emporium was the abortifacient (Poinciana pulcharrima), popularly known as the "peacock flower."	1
Londa Schiebinger's book attempts to explain why this was the case: why knowledge of a plant whose abortifacient powers were widely known in the East and West Indies was scarcely to be found in Europe. Through this exercise in "agnotology" (the study of cultural ignorances), she illuminates the whole enterprise of "bioprospecting" in the colonial Atlantic world, together with other important aspects of medicine and natural history.	. . .

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