ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From “Raw Plant” to Remedy: Peasant and Indigenous Skill in the Making of Pharmaceutical Value

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

English Abstract

Across Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century, pharmaceutical manufacturers confronted a looming shortage of medicinal plants. Agricultural intensification, industrialization, and urbanization degraded habitats and diminished wild stands. Two solutions gained authority among scientists and industrialists: expanding plantation cultivation (beyond the exceptional case of cinchona) and “modernizing” the collecting, drying, and storage practices of Indigenous and peasant producers, newly cast as archaic and inefficient. This paper examines the disjunction between that modernizing discourse and the stubborn material dependence of drug supply chains on the situated knowledge of peasants—Indigenous and European—most often women and children. I argue that the industry’s rhetoric of improvement obscured the fact that botanical quality, pharmacological efficacy, and market value were co produced in fields, forests, and households long before plants reached laboratories or factories.

Methodologically, the paper challenges the familiar core–periphery narrative of “raw material” extraction followed by metropolitan transformation. Medicinal plants are not inert inputs: their properties hinge on when and how they are sown, tended, harvested, cut, dried, and packaged. In this sense, transformation begins once the seed is in the ground. By following these skill intensive operations, I foreground the labor, judgment, and micro techniques that underwrote pharmaceutical modernity while remaining largely invisible in its archives. Attending to what some theorize as the Plantationocene, I also trace how European experts selectively learned from small scale Indigenous cultivation as a model for European countrysides—reversing the presumed one way flow of expertise from “center” to “periphery.” The result is a plural history of pharmacobotany that re-situates women’s and children’s work at the heart of drug making, reframes modernization as a contested project, and rethinks where scientific authority was made in the early twentieth century—an exercise in epistemic disobedience that re-locates expertise far beyond the factory gate.

Author

• Matti Leprêtre, Sciences Po Paris / EHESS