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Article ID: CBB410787740

Could Siberian ‘Natural Curiosities’ Be Replaced? Bioprospecting in the Eighteenth-Century (2022)

Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Volume: 27
Issue: 3
Pages: 257-277
Publication date: 2022
Language: English

URI: https://brill.com/view/journals/esm/27/3/article-p257_2.xml

DOI: 10.1163/15733823-20220046

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Commodity exchanges Controversies and disputes Naturalists Cross-national interaction Bioprospecting Collectors and collecting Biological specimens 18th century St. Petersburg (Russia) London (England) Siberia (Russia) Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk Royal Society of London

This article focuses on three unique products circulating in the eighteenth-century marketplace – castor, mammoth tusks, and asbestos – and highlights the role of naturalists working for the Royal Society in London and at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in promoting the consumption of these goods. Naturalists’ scientific investigations of these products were essential to distinguish and identify the quality (and, correspondingly, the ideal price) of Siberian commodities as compared to similar, or even equivalent, commodities from other regions. When these products were later discovered in the British colonies, the scientific debates between London and St. Petersburg only gained a new urgency, inspiring arguments about authenticity and efficaciousness.

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