Zachary Dorner

Zachary Dorner is a historian of the early modern Anglophone Atlantic world, who specializes in
the histories of empire, exchange, and medicine.

He earned his PhD from Brown University in 2016 and taught at Stanford and
Johns Hopkins Universities before coming to the University of Maryland. At its broadest, his
work considers how material things influenced the ways people understood themselves and the
world around them. His first book addressed medicine’s codependence on plantation
agriculture, long-distance trade, financial markets, and colonial warfare. For some, medicinal
commodities offered the prospect of power and wealth, but for others they were part of the
mechanisms of enslavement that prompted reconsiderations of the bodies and remedies that
moved across emergent global networks. Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion
of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century was published by the University of Chicago Press
(2020) and was shortlisted for several prizes including the Kenshur Prize from the Center for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, British Society for the History of Science Pickstone Prize, and the
Hagley Prize in Business History.

Dorner’s other publications include articles in the William and Mary Quarterly (2015)
and Journal of British Studies (2019). A book chapter and article forthcoming in 2023 consider
the business records of the transatlantic medicine trade and the recovery of pharmacy’s bound
labor regimes. He has also written for public audiences in the Washington Post, Boston Review,
and Commonplace, as well as a medical audience in the journal CHEST.

Ongoing projects include a second book, "Caring for the Precariat: State Responsibility in an Age
of Uncertainty," that reexamines the dependent populations tasked with doing the work of
empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—namely enslaved men, women, and children, military veterans, the poor, prisoners, and servants—through an interdisciplinary
methodology to link punitive state institutions to palliative ones in the history of healthcare.

Dorner is a co-organizer of the Washington Early American Seminar and has
taught in the University Honors Program where his undergraduate degree in biology came in
especially handy.