Footnotes of a Global History: Bolivian Cocaine, Italian Entrepreneurs, and Germanophone Science, c. 1850–1870s

Abstract Cocaine has become a paradigmatic case in the study of drugs and global histories, illuminating the interplay of bioprospecting, transcultural exchange, commodification, and legal regimes. Existing scholarship traces a trajectory from traditional Andean uses of kuka and Spanish colonial prohibitions to the nineteenth-century chemical research of Friedrich Wöhler and Albert Niemann, who isolated what is known today as cocaine. This narrative, however, is often framed through a teleological lens that moves from Indigenous “discovery,” through Catholic Spanish regulation, to Protestant Germanophone science. Such framing obscures alternative actors and circuits that were central to the making of cocaine’s modern history. This article examines one such neglected episodes: in 1858, the Italian pharmacist Enrique Pizzi announced his study of “Cocaïna” while working at his Botica y Droguería in La Paz. Samples of his preparation were delivered to Wöhler and Niemann’s laboratory in Göttingen by the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi, routed through Vienna. Drawing on archival and primary sources from Bolivia, Peru, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the article reconsiders this episode, which has often been dismissed in contemporary and later accounts as either fraudulent or failed. Rather than altering the canonical story of cocaine’s global emergence, Pizzi’s work highlights how selective archival survival and historiographical framing have created gaps in the global history of cocaine. By restoring this missing link, the article reflects on the silences and asymmetries that structure global drug histories and argues for a more plural account of scientific modernity in nineteenth-century Latin America.