Book workshop for Sebestian Kroupa: Drugs on the Move: Making Cross-Cultural Knowledge in Southeast Asia, c.1650–1750

This book manuscript reconstructs in micro-historical detail how knowledge was produced at the frontiers of empires by a variety of agents across cultures, genders, and social status, including Filipina women, Muslim traders, Catholic missionaries, and European scholars. Drawing on a wide array of archival resources in five languages from across Asia, America, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific, Drugs on the Move unveils the global character of early modern knowledge and underscores non-European and non-élite contributions to the making of science, medicine, and modernity.

Image: Georg Joseph Kamel’s drawing of igasur, or the St Ignatius bean – a Filipino Indigenous panacea that became a globally marketed drug in the eighteenth century.