1 Among the works that have influenced my thinking on the colonial drug trade are Huguet-Termes, Teresa, ‘New world materia medica in Spanish renaissance medicine: from scholarly reception to practical impact’, Medical History, 45, 2001, pp. 359–376Google ScholarPubMed; Schiebinger, Londa, ‘Prospecting for drugs: European naturalists in the West Indies’, in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial botany: science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, pp. 119–133Google Scholar, 302–7; Chakrabarti, Pratik, Materials and medicine: trade, conquest and therapeutics in the eighteenth century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010Google Scholar; Wallis, Patrick, ‘Exotic drugs and English medicine: England’s drug trade, c. 1550–c. 1800’, Social History of Medicine, 25, 2011, pp. 20–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the special issue of Social History of Medicine, 26, 3, 2013, on ‘Mobilising medicine: trade and healing in the early modern Atlantic world’; Zupanov, Ines G. and Xavier, Angela Barreto, ‘Quest for permanence in the tropics: Portuguese bioprospecting in Asia (16th–18th centuries)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 57, 2014, pp. 511–548CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gänger, Stefanie, ‘World trade in medicinal plants from Spanish America, 1717–1815’, Medical History, 59, 1, 2015, pp. 44–82CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Schiebinger, Londa, Plants and empire: colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004Google Scholar.

3 For comparison, see Smith, Stefan Halikowski, ‘“Profits spout like tropical plants”: a fresh look at what went wrong with the Eurasian spice trade, c.1550–1800’, Journal of Global History, 3, 2008, pp. 389–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For the history of rhubarb, see Foust, Clifford M., Muscovite and mandarin: Russia’s trade with China and its setting, 1727–1805, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969, pp. 164–185Google Scholar; Foust, Clifford M., Rhubarb: the wondrous drug, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Che-Chia, Chang, ‘Origins of a misunderstanding: the Qianlong emperor’s embargo on rhubarb exports to Russia, the scenario and its consequences’, Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, 1, 2, 2006, pp. 335–354CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monahan, Erika, ‘Locating rhubarb: early modernity’s relevant obscurity’, in Paula Findlen, ed., Early modern things: objects and their histories, 1500–1800, New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 227–251Google Scholar.

5 For example, see Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, Collections of travels through Turky into Persia, and the East-Indies, vol. 1, London, 1684, p. 182Google Scholar.

6 For Russia’s drug trade, see Martin, Janet, Treasure of the land of darkness: the fur trade and its significance for medieval Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 42–43Google Scholar, 90–1, 93. Kunkel, Natalie, Wissenschaftsaustausch zwischen Rußland und Westeuropa, insbesondere Deutschland, in der Botanik and Pharmazie vom 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1999, pp. 144–145Google Scholar, discusses rhubarb; and Nanzatov, B. Z. and Sodnompilova, M. M., ‘Lekarstvennye sredstva v torgovo-obmennykh operatsiiakh mezhdu Rossiei, Mongoliei i Kitaem v XVII–XIX vv. (Medicine in trade and exchange transactions among Russia, Mongolia and China in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries)’, Vestnik BNTs SO RAN, 16, 4, 2014, pp. 92–93Google Scholar, mentions rhubarb.

7 Appleby, J. H., ‘British doctors in Russia, 1657–1807: their contribution to Anglo-Russian medical and natural history’, PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1979Google Scholar; Wills, Rebecca, The Jacobites and Russia, 1715–1750, East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2002, pp. 40–67Google Scholar.

8 By comparison, among the many works on East–West medical knowledge are the special issue of Journal of the Japan–Netherlands Institute, 3, 1994, on science and technology; Bivins, Robert E., Acupuncture, expertise and cross-cultural medicine, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cook, Harold J., Matters of exchange: commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch golden age, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raj, Kapil, Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bruijn, Iris, Ship’s surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: commerce and the progress of medicine in the eighteenth century, Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winterbottom, Anne E., ‘Of the China root: a case study of the early modern circulation of materia medica’, Social History of Medicine, 28, 1, 2015, pp. 22–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 For Russia’s botanical exchanges with the West, see Rowell, Margery, ‘Medicinal plants in tsarist Russia’, Janus, 63, 1976, pp. 85–93Google ScholarPubMed; Rowell, Margery, ‘Russian medical botany before the time of Peter the Great’, Sudhoffs Archiv, 62, 4, 1978, pp. 339–358Google ScholarPubMed; Appleby, ‘British doctors’, pp. 337–65; Appelby, J. H., ‘Daniel Dumaresq, D.D., F.R.S. (1712–1805) as a promoter of Anglo-Russian science and culture’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 44, 1, 1990, pp. 25–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rachel Koroloff, ‘Seeds of exchange: collecting for Russia’s apothecary and botanical gardens in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 2014.

10 Demidova, H. F. and Miasnikov, V. S., eds., Russko-Kitaiskie otnosheniia v XVII veke (Russian–Chinese relations in the seventeenth century), vol. 1, 1608–1683, Moscow: Nauka, 1969, no. 182, 28 February 1675, p. 336Google Scholar.

11 For an overview, see Mancall, Mark, Russia and China: their diplomatic relations to 1728, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971Google Scholar; Perdue, Peter C., China marches west: the Qing conquest of Central Asia, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 2005, pp. 94–173Google Scholar.

12 For the trade negotiations, see Barany, George, The Anglo-Russian entente cordiale of 1697–1698: Peter I and William III at Utrecht, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1986Google Scholar.

13 Avril, Philippe, Travels into divers parts of Europe and Asia, London, 1693, p. 142Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., pp. 142–3.

15 Ibid., pp. 143–4.

16 Ibid., pp. 144–6.

17 For a summary of the seventeenth-century trade relations with China, see Kotilaine, Jarmo, Russia’s foreign trade and economic expansion in the seventeenth century: windows on the world, Leiden, Brill, 2005, pp. 484–493Google Scholar.

18 Foust, Muscovite and mandarin, pp. 15–18; Mancall, , Russia and China, pp. 208–213Google Scholar; Perdue, China marches west, pp. 133–299.

19 Burgess, Renate, ‘Thomas Garvine: Ayrshire surgeon active in Russia and China’, Medical History, 19, 1975, pp. 91–95CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

20 Bell also wrote a short biography of Peter the Great, focused on his Caucasian blunders. National Library of Scotland, MS 189, Carmichael and Gordon Papers, ‘Sundry anecdotes of Peter the first’, ff. 10–29.

21 Bell, John, Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia to divers parts of Asia, 2 vols., Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1763, vol. 1, pp. 110–111Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 281.

23 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 312–13.

24 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 141.

25 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 93–4.

26 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 130–1.

27 Jartoux, Father, ‘The description of a Tartarian plant, called Ginseng; with an account of its virtues’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Abridged, eds. Charles Hutton, George Shaw, and Richard Pearson, vol. VI, from 1713 to 1733, London: C. and B. Baldwin, 1809, pp. 56–61Google Scholar, here 56.

28 du Halde, J. B., Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tatarie, vol. 3, La Haye: Henri Scheurleer, 1736, pp. 461–467Google Scholar.

29 Rowell, Margery, ‘Linnaeus and botanists in eighteenth-century Russia’, Taxon, 29, 1, 1980, pp. 15–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 23–4; Appleby, John H., ‘“Rhubarb” Mounsey and the Surinam toad: a Scottish physician-naturalist in Russia’, Archives of Natural History, 11, 1982, pp. 137–152CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

30 Thomas, Graham C. G., ‘Some correspondence of Dr. James Mounsey, physician to the empress of Russia’, Scottish Slavonic Review, 4, 1985, p. 19Google Scholar.

31 Bell, Travels from St. Petersburg, vol. 2, pp. 142–3.

32 Gmelin, Johann Georg, Voyage en Sibérie, 2 vols., Paris: Desant, 1767, vol. 2, p. 183Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 32.

34 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 257–8.

35 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 204–5.

36 His major study of Siberian plants was published in Latin, , Flora Sibirica sive historia plantarum Sibiriae, 4 vols., St Petersburg, 1747–69Google Scholar. His travel journals were first published in German, followed by Dutch and French translations; Gmelin, J. G., Reise durch Sibirien vom dem Jahr 1733 bis 1743, 4 vols., Gottingen: Abram Bandenhoect, 1751–52Google Scholar.

37 The Tomsk number is in Hellie, Richard, The economy and material culture of Russia, 1600–1725, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 191Google Scholar; that for Tobolsk is from Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 46–7. For the first appearance, see Willan, T. S., The early history of the Russia Company, 1553–1603, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956, p. 82Google Scholar.

38 ‘The Sound Toll register’, http://www.soundtoll.nl/index.php/en/over-het-project/str-online/ (consulted 30 October 2014). For a brief discussion of rhubarb imports in the seventeenth century, see Wallis, ‘Exotic drugs’, pp. 31–2.

39 Hinton, R. W. K., The Eastland trade and the common weal in the seventeenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959, p. 104Google Scholar.

40 Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 47–55; Hellie, Economy, pp. 191–2.

41 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (The complete collection of the laws of the Russian empire), Series 1, 45 vols, St Petersburg, 1830, vol. 7, no. 5110, 26 June 1727, pp. 819–21. Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 55–7, details the decree.

42 ‘Sound Toll register’.

43 Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 8, no. 5741, 8 April 1731, p. 450.

44 Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 56–8.

45 ‘Sound Toll register’. Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 55–7, also notes this period of increased volume, based on the London port records.

46 Shiffner is ‘Sheffner’ or ‘Sheffer’ in the archival documents. For a discussion of Shiffner and Wolff’s business operations, see Cross, Anthony, By the banks of the Neva: chapters from the lives and careers of the British in eighteenth-century Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 55–58Google Scholar.

47 The National Archives, United Kingdom (henceforth TNA), State Papers: Russia (henceforth SP 91), 19, ‘Rondeau to Samuel Holden’, 27 December 1735, ff. 6–9. Foust, Rhubarb, p. 260, n. 62, refers to the Chitty affair as ‘somewhat mysterious and seems to have died without resolution’, which is not the case.

48 TNA, SP 91/19, ‘Copy of Chitty’s petition’, 24 May 1736, ff. 80–6.

49 TNA, SP 91/19, ‘Rondeau’s answer to Chitty’s petition’, 10 July 1736, ff. 143–50.

50 TNA, CO 389/29, ‘Report to the Lords of the Commerce Council upon Mr. Chitty’s petition’, 27 May 1736, ff. 213–14. The Russian government also supported Shiffner and Wolff’s innocence: TNA, SP 91/19, ‘Memorial from Osterman’, in Russian f. 151r., in French translation f. 152r.

51 TNA, SP 91/20, ‘Verdict in Chitty affair’, 11 August 1736, f. 15r–v.

52 Senatskii arkhiv (Senate archive), 15 vols., St Petersburg: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1888–1913, vol. 5, pp. 396–411, 20 August 1742. Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 66–7, discusses this in greater detail.

53 ‘Sound Toll register’.

54 Hanway, Jonas, An historical account of the British trade over the Caspian Sea, 4 vols., London, 1753, vol. 1, p. 127Google Scholar.

55 Monahan, Erika, ‘Trade and empire: merchant networks, frontier commerce, and the state in Western Siberia, 1644–1728’, PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2007, pp. 360–361Google Scholar.

56 Senatskii arkhiv, vol. 5, pp. 543–8, 3 March 1743.

57 The British government received this guarantee in 1756, but it was immediately violated as Russia entered the war on the side of the French. See, for example, TNA, SP 91/60, ‘Note given to Hanbury-Williams from the Russian Chancellors’, 12 March 1756, ff. 164–5.

58 TNA, Treasury, T 64/241, ‘An account of the exports of British manufactures from Scotland to Holland Germany and Russia distinguishing each year, and the species of goods and the quantities and values to each of the said countries for forty years, preceding January 1772’.

59 TNA, CO 388/49, ‘Bute to Lords Commissioners of Trade’, 17 August 1761, f. 92; ‘Mr. Wood to Lords Commissioners’, 19 September 1761, ff. 124–5; ‘Counter-project of a treaty of commerce with Russia’, 11 November 1761, ff. 139–51.

60 TNA, SP 91/71, ‘Buckinghamshire to Hallifax’, 28 February 1763, ff. 117–20.

61 Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 63–72.

62 This was part of an extensive review of export taxes. Senatskii arkhiv, vol. 12, pp. 150–67, 18 and 22 April, and 20 May 1762, pp. 150–67 (rhubarb is noted on pp. 155–6).

63 ‘Sound Toll register’.

64 Kirchner, Walther, trans. and ed., A Siberian journey: the journal of Hans Jakob Fries, 1774–1776, London: Frank Cass, 1974, p. 133Google Scholar.

65 For a discussion of the acclimatization process, see H. K. Roessingh, ‘Tobacco growing in Holland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a case study of the innovative spirit of Dutch peasants’, in The Low Countries history yearbook 1978, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979, pp. 18–54. For a British estimate of production levels, see TNA, CO 389/19, ‘Report to the House of Commons’, 19 November 1707, ff. 181–297, esp. 243–5.

66 Koerner, Lisbet, Linnaeus: nature and nation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 116–126Google Scholar, 136–9.

67 Peter Simon Pallas originally published his writings in German, as Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs, 3 vols., St Petersburg, 1771–76. He later published a complete record of all of his travels across the empire in French, Voyages de M. P. S. Pallas, en différentes provinces de l’empire de Russie, et dans l’Asie septentrionale, trans. Gauthier de la Peyronie, 5 vols., Paris: Maradan, 1788–93. Johann Gottlieb Georgi also published his account in German, Bemerkungen einer Reise im Russischen Reich im Jahre 1772, St Petersburg, 1775; it was translated into English, as Russia: or, a compleat historical account of all the nations which compose that empire, trans. William Tooke, 4 vols., London, 1780–83. Though Pallas’ work was not formally translated into English, some of his text was included in William Coxe, Account of the Russian discoveries between Asia and America, 3rd edn, London: J. Nichols, 1787, particularly the chapter on rhubarb, pp. 351–63.

68 Georgi, Russia, vol. 4, p. 34.

69 Ibid., vol. 4, p. 40.

70 The adoption of moxa in Great Britain and the Netherlands has been discussed in Rosen, George, ‘Sir William Temple and the therapeutic use of moxa for gout in England’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 44, 1970, pp. 31–39Google Scholar; and Lux, David S. and Cook, Harold J., ‘Closed circles or open networks? Communicating at a distance during the scientific revolution’, History of Science, 36, 1998, pp. 183–184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 For example, see the Russian American Company’s plan to improve its Pacific trade options, in Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Yudin Collection of Russian-American Company Records, Box 1, folder 11, ‘Memo by N. Rezanov’, 20 July 1806, ff. 176–85.

72 This idea follows from the work of Lux and Cook, who investigated the importance of trust and family connections as part of the exchange of scientific knowledge in the early modern period in their article ‘Closed circles and open networks’.

73 Appleby, ‘British doctors’; Wills, Jacobites and Russia, pp. 41–55.

74 National Records of Scotland (henceforth NRS), Papers of the Shairp family of Houston, West Lothian, GD30, 1583/3, ‘Letter from Walter Shairp’, 16 September 1749.

75 NRS, Botanical papers of John Hope MD professor of botany and materia medica at Edinburgh, GD253/144/5/1, ‘Letter from John Bell of Antermony’, 1 June 1765.

76 NRS, GD253/144/5/2, ‘Letter from John Bell of Antermony’, 10 June 1765.

77 NRS, GD253/144/5/5, ‘Letter from Professor Pallas’, 18 May 1777. Pallas’ criticism of Siberian harvesting practices echoed complaints from the government in the 1650s. See Monahan, ‘Trade and empire’, p. 370.

78 NRS, GD253/144/5/10, ‘Price of rhubarb’.

79 Coxe, Account of the Russian discoveries, p. 355.

80 Ibid., pp. 351–2.

81 Ibid., pp. 354–5.

82 Ibid., p. 363.

83 Ibid., p. 362.

84 Fordyce, William, The great importance and proper method of cultivating and curing rhubarb in Britain for medicinal uses, London: T. Spilsbury and Son, 1792, pp. 1–2Google Scholar.

85 Ibid., pp. 11–12.

86 NRS, GD253/144/7b/2/1, ‘Extrait d’une lettre du Père Papin, Jésuite, sur les arts et la médecine de la Chine’.

87 NRS, GD253/144/3/25, ‘Seeds from China’ (author unknown).

88 NRS, GD253/145/7/10, ‘Letter from Matthew Guthrie’, 20 June 1778. An abbreviated version of this letter was published in Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, 5, part 1, 1778, pp. 434–6. Margery Rowell, ‘Medicinal plants’, p. 88, points out that the chrysanthemum plant was first observed in Wilhelm Steller’s notes from the Second Kamchatka Expedition earlier in the century.

89 Appleby, ‘British doctors’, pp. 358–65.

90 NRS, Letters, various versions of botanical description of asafoetida, GD253/144/2/1, ‘Dr. Pallas’s notes’, f. 2.

91 NRS, GD253/144/2/1, ‘Letter from Matthew Guthrie’, 16 August 1777, f. 1.

92 NRS, GD253/144/2/7, ‘Names of gentlemen to whom seeds of the Asa foetida were sent ’82’, February 1783.

93 British Library, Additional Manuscripts 33,554, Bentham Papers, vol. 18, Miscellaneous Papers, ff. 29v–30v, 20 January 1782.

94 Pharmacopoea Rossica, St Petersburg, 1782; Peter Simon Pallas, Flora Rossica seu Stirpium Imperii Rossici per Europam et Asiam indigenarum descriptiones, 2 vols., Frankfurt: Ioannem Georgium Fleischer, 1789.

95 Duncan, Andrew, ed., Medical Commentaries for the Year 1780, vol. 7, London: Charles Dilly, 1783, p. 228Google Scholar.

96 Desmond, Ray, The European discovery of the Indian flora, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 202–203Google Scholar.

97 NRS, GD253/144/2/1, ‘Letter from Matthew Guthrie’, 16 August 1777, f. 1.

98 TNA, Russia: Letters and papers supplementary, FO 97/342, ‘Charles Whitworth to Lord Grenville’, 19 October 1793, f. 69v.

99 ‘Sound Toll register’.

100 Foust, Rhubarb, pp. 213–20; Monahan, ‘Locating rhubarb’, pp. 237–41.

101 The China side of the ban has been discussed in the work of Millward, James A., Beyond the pass: economy, ethnicity, and empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 178–180Google Scholar; Chang, ‘Origins’; and Mosca, Matthew W., ‘The Qing state and its awareness of Eurasian interconnections, 1789–1806’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 47, 2, 2014, pp. 103–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 NRS, GD253/144/5/5, ‘Letter from Professor Pallas’, 18 May 1777.

103 In addition to the works on botany cited above, this includes Posselt, Dorris, ‘Forschungsreisen in Ruβland im 18. Jahrhundert und ihre Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der Biologie’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift: Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Reihe, 2, 1976, pp. 181–201Google Scholar; Winkler, Martina, ‘From ruling people to owning land: Russian concepts of imperial possession in the North Pacific, 18th and early 19th centuries’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 59, 2011, pp. 321–353Google Scholar; Jones, Ryan Tucker, Empire of extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s strange beasts of the sea, 1741–1867, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.