Ben completed his PhD from UT Austin's history department in May 2015 and took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University in August. Last spring he was offered a tenure-track position at UC Santa Cruz's Department of History, which he'll join in January of 2017. His dissertation, "Tropical Transplantations," was recently awarded UT Austin's Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2016.
Benjamin Breen
Ph.D. CandidateDepartment of HistoryUniversity of Texas, Austin
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Dissertation Research Fellow
Cures from New Worlds: the Portuguese Tropics and the Origins of the Global Drug Trade, 1640-1760
Abstract. The early modern Portuguese empire served as the site of one of the most important botanical transfers in history: the circulation of medicinal drugs such as opium, tobacco, cinchona, ipecac and cacao between the emporia of the Americas, Africa and Asia. The merchants, mariners and cultivators who helped create and sustain this trade played a key role as catalysts in the eighteenth-century transformations of both global medical consumption and scientific understandings of nature and the human body, yet their history remains largely unwritten. Drawing upon evidence from mercantile records, scientific correspondence, historical archeology and textual accounts of healers, botanists and apothecaries in the British and Portuguese colonies, this dissertation explores how the urgent necessity of staying alive on the frontiers of empire forged new links between local knowledge and global trade – and between Lusophone ‘botanical go-betweens’ and key figures in the history of science and medicine such as Robert Boyle, William Dampier and Hans Sloane.
Updates
Benjamin Breen
Benjamin Breen
Breen is the editor-in-chief of The Appendix (which he co-founded with former Consortium fellow Christopher Heaney). He is finishing a Ph.D. at UT Austin on a Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and is also a 2014-2016 Mellon-Rare Book School Fellow in Critical Bibliography. Last year he published "No Man Is an Island: Knowledge Networks, Early Modern Globalization, and George Psalmanazar's Formosa," in The Journal of Early Modern History and "'The Elks Are Our Horses': Animals and Domestication in the New French Borderlands" in the Journal of Early American History.
Benjamin Breen
are starting an online journal of archival and narrative history, The Appendix.