Apothecaries, Artists, and Artisans: Early Industrial Material Culture in the Biological Old Regime

Common knowledge attributes the motives of the earliest Spanish conquistadors in the Americas to the quest for “gold, glory, and God.” Although this assumption has validity, it underestimates the complexity of Spanish aims once the long process of conquest and colonization was underway. The widespread trade networks and environmental changes brought about by the Columbian Exchange indicate that efforts to attain wealth went beyond the extraction of precious metals or even the cultivation of cash crops. Rather, evidence shows systematic and strategic efforts on the part of the Spanish Crown within the first century of contact to seek out a variety of natural resources of a more mundane, yet equally important, sort—new sources of adhesive resins, gums, glues, and plasters; new kinds of pigments; new salt and ore deposits; and new medicines derived from the plant and animal species of the Americas. Many of these resources served multiple purposes as...