ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Roots and Remedies: Global Histories of the Pharmaceuticalization of Herbal Knowledge II

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel investigates the contested histories of medicinal plants and their pharmaceutical transformations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It traces how herbal knowledge was reshaped as plants circulated between empires, laboratories, and local healing traditions. By following trajectories from Madagascar to Mexico, from China to colonial Southeast Asia, the interventions show how botanical knowledge was appropriated, standardized, or resisted in the making of global pharmaceuticals.

The work presented here has grown out of workshops held in 2024 and 2025 and builds on the collective discussions that emerged there, as well as on a developing book project, How Plants Became Natural Remedies. A Global History of the Pharmaceuticalization of Herbal Knowledge. Foregrounding “shifting perspectives,” the panel highlights how indigenous, subaltern, and popular practices were not simply overwritten by modern science but often coexisted with, challenged, or informed industrial drug production. A central novelty of our approach is to situate these processes within the industrialization of pharmacy, a period long assumed to have marked the disappearance of medicinal plants from pharmaceutical modernity. Our contributions instead demonstrate how plants remained central to the making of pharmaceutical industries—through processes of drug discovery, experimental production, and commodification—and how their trajectories compel us to connect the history of science with the history of environments and empires. At the same time, we stress that the direction of pharmaceutical innovation did not flow exclusively from North to South: in many cases, postcolonial states in the Global South became drivers of alternative pharmaceutical modernities.

Contributors examine the plantation as a site of extraction and epistemic violence; the alkaloid paradigm and its role in transforming ritual plants like peyote or ephedra into molecular commodities; and the ways postcolonial states mobilized plant knowledge to assert alternative pharmaceutical modernities.

Together, the papers destabilize linear narratives of progress from “traditional” to “modern” medicine and complicate dichotomies between nature and culture, science and tradition, or West and non-West. They reveal instead plural, contested, and entangled worlds of healing in which medicinal plants were at once resources, symbols, and sites of resistance. By situating herbal drugs within the intertwined histories of empires, nationalism, industry, and environment, the panel speaks to the conference’s call for plural histories of science and invites reflection on the enduring global significance of plants in health and medicine.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Matti Leprêtre, Sciences Po Paris / EHESS

Individual Presentations

• Searching for Alkaloids in a Shortage Society: Bioprospecting and Vernacular Materia Medica in the Early Soviet Era - Olga Belichenko; Maria Pirogovskaya, LMU, Munich

• Transformations in Practices of Colonial Bioprospecting. Chaulmoogra-based Drugs in the Early 20th Century - Dominique Merdes, TU Braunschweig, Germany

• From “Raw Plant” to Remedy: Peasant and Indigenous Skill in the Making of Pharmaceutical Value - Matti Leprêtre, Sciences Po Paris / EHESS