Abstract
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Asia was at the heart of international efforts to create a new utopia: a world free from disease. This is a political, intellectual and social history of those efforts, from the late-colonial era through the first generation after independence. The work is positioned at the boundary between international history, the history of Asian nationalism and decolonization, and the history of post-colonial public health and medicine. These fields come together in my focus on international institutions as a site for the exchange of ideas and policies on disease, welfare and development. The book focuses primarily on India, but suggests that debates and interventions in the field of public health were pan-Asian, sometimes even global, as a result of the intellectual, personal and technological connections forged through international health institutions. As a result, the story takes us from Delhi to Djakarta, Rangoon and Zagreb.
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Notes
K. Davis, ‘The Amazing Decline of Mortality in Underdeveloped Areas’, American Economic Review, 46, 2 (1956), 305–18.
A. Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
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Examples of recent work which I have found particularly illuminating include: M. Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence, and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); M. Connelly, ‘Population Control is History: New Perspectives on the Intemational Campaign to Limit Population Growth’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45 (2003), 122–47; D.C. Engerman, ‘The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, 28, 1 (2004), 23–54, and C. Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), esp. pp. 320–22. Informal processes of medical exchange, of course, can be traced back over millennia.
M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1976), pp. 23–6. On the nature of these transitions, see also C. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
For a detailed history of the sanitary conferences, see N.M. Goodman, International Health Organizations and Their Work (London, 1952).
J. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1996), p. 347.
J.M. Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League ofNations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Susan Pedersen ‘Settler Power: What Difference did the League of Nations Make?’ Paper presented at conference on ‘Settler Colonialisms in the Twentieth Century’, Harvard University, October 2002, p. 1. I am grateful to Dr Pedersen for showing me the manuscript of her talk. See also M.D. Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations in Africa, 1914–1931 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1999).
M. Dubin, ‘The League of Nations Health Organization’, in P. Weindling (ed.), International Health Organizations and Movements, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 56–80.
M.A. Balinska, For The Good of Humanity: Ludwik Rajchman Medical Statesman, trans. R. Howell (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998).
For more on the Rockefeller Foundation, see Chapter 1 below. For a detailed but rather narrow history see, J. Farley, To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913–1951) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
H. Bell, Frontiers of Medicine in the Anglo-E,gyptian Sudan, 1899–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter six.
See, in particular, L. Murard and P. Zylberman, ‘L’Autre Guerre (1914–1918). La Sante Publique En France Sous L’Oeil de l’Amérique’, Revue Historique 276 (1986), 367–98; L. Murard and P. Zylberman, ‘French Social Medicine on the International Public Health Map in the 1930s’, in E. Rodriguez-OcarTa (ed.), The Politics of the Healthy Life: An International Perspective (Sheffield: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 2002), pp. 197–218. The latest research emerging from work on the Rockefeller Archives is available in the Rockefeller Research Reports, at http://www.archive.rockefeller.edu/publications/resrep/rronlinemain.php [accessed 20 December 2005]. For a more conventionally ‘instrumentalist’ view, see S. Hewa, Colonialism, Tropical Disease and Imperial Medicine: Rockefeller Philanthropy in Sri Lanka (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995).
M. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 5.
P. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Centwy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
On the concern of early colonial medicine with the bodies of slaves, see Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), chapter five; Megan Vaughan, ‘Smallpox, Slavery and Revolution: 1792 on Ile de France’, Social History of Medicine, 13 (2000), 411–28.
Key works in the field include: D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); W. Anderson, ‘Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution’, Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995), 640–69; M. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills. Two historiographical reviews: S. Marks, ‘What is Colonial About Colonial Medicine? And What has Happened to Imperialism and Health?’ Social History of Medicine, 10, 2 (1997) 205–9; W. Anderson, ‘Where is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 79, 3 (1998), 522–30.
W. Anderson, ‘The Third World Body’ in R. Cooter and J. Picktone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 235–45; Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, p. 23.
Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchill and C. Gordon (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).
See, for example, D. Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’, Social Text, 43 (1995), 191–220; Prakash, Another Reason; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Sarah Hodges, ‘Governmentality, Population and the Reproductive Family in Modern India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 13 March 2004
Cf. Carey Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association and Citizenship (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). See Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 110–32, on the discourse of community development and cooperation in late-colonial India.
On this process in general, see Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press). See also, Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On State Society and Discourse in India’, in J. Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London/New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 72–99; Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘In Search of Civil Society’ in Kaviraj and S. Khilnani (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 287–323.
For different views on this tendency, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986); Sugata Bose, ‘Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: The Indian Experience in Comparative Perspective’, in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 45–63. Bose suggests, contra Chatterjee, that centralization was not an inevitable but a contingent outcome. See also K. Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Agrawal (eds), Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a sensitive consideration of the state-centred political culture of Indonesia, see Henk Schulte Nordholt, ‘A Genealogy of Violence’, in F. Colombijn and Th. Lindblad (eds), Roots of Violence in Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1002), pp. 33–61; see also Benedict Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, SoutheastAsia and the World (London: Verso, 1998).
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Development Planning and the Indian State’, in P. Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 271–97.
Randall Packard, ‘Postcolonial Medicine’, in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century; and R. Packard, ‘Malaria Dreams: Postwar Visions of Health and Development in the Third World’, Medical Anthropology, 17 (1997), 279–96.
S. Bose and A. Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London/New York, 1998), p. 110. See also the indictment in M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 1999).
F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in British and French Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 376–7.
J.W. Meyer, J. Boli, G.M. Thomasa and F. Ramirez, ‘World Society and the Nation State’, The American Journal of Sociology, 103, 1 (1997), 144–81.
On China, see H. Van de Ven, ‘War in the Making of Modern China’, Modern Asian Studies, 30, 4 (1996), 737–56; J. Banister, China’s Changing Population (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); for a contemporary account, see J.S. Horn, Away With All Pests: An English Surgeon in People’s China, 1954–69 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). On Vietnam, see Andrew Hardy, ‘One Hundred Years of Malaria Control in Vietnam: A Regional Retrospective’, Part 2, Mekong Malaria Forum, 6 (April 2000).
For the comparison, see Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. chapter 1.
David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, New Cambridge History of India, 3, 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter three.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London: Verso, 2°d ed., 1991).
See Benedict Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, pp. 299–317; A. Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 169–98.
R.H. Taylor (ed.), Burma: Political Economy Under Military Rule (London: Palgrave, 2001).
F. Frankel, India’s Political Economy: The Gradual Revolution, 1947–1977: The Gradual Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapters five and six.
There is an extensive critical literature on the political culture of development, and particularly on the role of science and technology within it. The most important works include: J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); A. Nandy, ‘Science as a Reason of State’ in A. Nandy (ed.), Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 1–26; J. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); A. Escobar, Enountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); A. Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham NC & London: Duke University Press, 1998).
Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 140.
On the tension between public health and clinical medicine in the British context, see Dorothy Porter, ‘Enemies of the Race: Biologism, Environmentalism and Public Health in Edwardian England’, Victorian Studies, 34, 2 (1991), 159–78.
D. Porter and R. Porter, ‘What Was Social Medicine? An Historiographical Essay’, Journal ofHistorical Sociology, 1, 1 (1988), 90–106.
P. Zylberman, ‘Fewer Parallels than Antitheses: Rene Sand and Andrija Stampar on Social Medicine, 1919–1955’, Social History of Medicine, 17, 1 (2004) 77–93, p. 89.
A. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); F. Soper, ‘Problems to be Solved if the Eradication of Tuberculosis is to be Realized’, American Journal ofPublic Health, 52, 5(1961), 734–48.
Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. xvi.
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© 2006 Sunil S. Amrith
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Amrith, S.S. (2006). Introduction. In: Decolonizing International Health. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627369_1
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