"Oceans of Drugs: Coffee, Sugar, Cocoa, Tobacco and the Reconstruction of the International Slave Trade, 1500-1880 AD"

Systematic arguments about empire including Mahan, Mackinder, Paul Kennedy, Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Paul Harvey showcase coherent imperial forms as subjects, and pathways around the world as axes of analysis (“sea power,” “heartland,” “world system,” “global fix”, etc.) This paper will focus on a different set of subjects: entrepreneurs I will call “chaos actors” who identify ancient logistical pathways formed to deliver addictive substances and seek to move them. The coherent forms are not empires but trade routes; the actors not states or empires but merchants. I will discuss medicine men like Cornelius Bontekoe, son of a Mennonite shopkeeper who prescribed coffee, tea, and tobacco to cure almost everything. Funded in part by the VOC, Bontekoe’s research on the role of circulation of blood in the body led him to make outlandish but credible claims about how stimulants like coffee, cocoa, and tobacco could prevent “scurvy, throat swellings, colic, podagra [gout], bad bile, bad breath, red eyes, and other ailments.” His mechanistic and empiricist framework for understanding the body was crucial in undermining the existing humoral theory of disease, revolutionizing European medicine while helping addict thousands of Europeans to coffee, tea, and tobacco. Likewise self-funded mercenaries like Jan Huygen van Linschoten copied the Portuguese empire’s secret charts in the 1590s, published it as Itinerario (1596) and so allowed thousands of merchants from around the world to break Portugal’s monopoly on trade around Cape Horn to the spice islands. A whole group of what Yuri Slezkin has called “Mercurians” made and remade these networks. I will suggest how Huguenot orientalist connoisseurs, Dutch idol breakers, Karaite Jews, Nestorian Christians, Manichean fakers, charlatans, and confidence men helped remake the world economy between 1500 and 1880, and how understanding these shape-shifting entrepreneurs can help us reassess the expansion of the international slave trade after 1500.