Manufactured medicine and British commerce in 19th c.

In Britain’s overseas colonies, “staggering mortality that greeted newcomers, planters and African captives both. The brutality, demographic turnover, malnutrition, overwork, warfare, and anxiety of the eighteenth-century Caribbean fueled the medicine trade to that region and informed large concerns about manpower.” Thus, the colonial demand for manufactured medicines, which “struck a chord with plantation owners, bureaucrats, and surgeons, who sought treatments for the populations they oversaw.” Esp. in second half of 18th c., “a kind of bulk, portable medicine appeared increasingly necessary and convenient . . . Manufactured medicine offered a convenient solution to the omnipresent challenge of manpower by the logic that certain treatments could work on anybody irrespective of external characteristics or internal complexion. . . . manpower concerns introduced manufactured medicines to issues of political economy, such as improvement, balance of trade, and white supremacy, that shaped the routines of the British empire” (Dorner, Intro, passim).