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Colonizing cannabis : medication, taxation, intoxication and oblivion, c. 1839-1955
Get PDFThe recent, renewed interest in thinking about the question 'what is colonial about colonial medicine?' has stimulated a range of fresh approaches to the issues raised. Among these approaches has been a focus on substances considered to be medical and the production of detailed accounts of their histories and the ways in which they came to feature in British scientific and medical circles. After briefly considering the rewards to be had from such an approach, this chapter will look at cannabis products and their history in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. In part this story is about the entry of preparations of the plant into western medical knowledge and practice. However, the paper also demonstrates that cannabis was not simply constructed as a medicine in western circles in this period. The ways in which competing understandings emerged of the plant and the substances that could be manufactured from it will also be explored. The purpose of doing this is two-fold. In the first instance the chapter begins to provide some answers to the question related to the one above of 'what is medical about colonial medicine'? In addressing this question the chapter also addresses its second concern, which is to put the plants back into the picture of the history of medicine in the colonial period
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Malaria in the Colonial Americas; malaria in Africa; insects, arthropods and diseases
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Decolonize mosquitoes: invisible labour, dissent and the re-colonial in South Asia
Get PDFThis article contributes to a dialogue between current decolonizing insights and the history of insects. It focusses on mosquitoes— miniscule vectors of spectacular diseases. Whilst foregrounding the prominence of the colonized in shaping the history of mosquitoes in South Asia, this article combines three distinct lines of decolonizing scholarship that are usually pursued independently of one another: critique of colonial knowledge; examination of anticolonial articulations of the colonized; exposé of how the post-colonial state inherits and reinforces atrocious colonial precedents. It enables the current decolonizing agenda to offer a critique of state power across chronological periods and political regimes
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Maladies of modernity: malaria and the making of Burdwan fever
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Mal-areas of health: dispersed histories of a diagnostic category
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Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890-1910
No full textThe drug quinine figured as an object of enforced consumption in British India between the late 1890s and the 1910s, when the corresponding diagnostic category malaria itself was redefined as a mosquito-borne fever disease. This article details an overlapping milieu in which quinine, mosquitoes and malaria emerged as intrinsic components of shared and symbiotic histories. It combines insights from new imperial histories, constructivism in the histories of medicine and literature about non-humans in science studies to examine the ways in which histories of insects, drugs, disease and empire interacted and shaped one another. Firstly, it locates the production of historical intimacies between quinine, malaria and mosquitoes within the exigencies and apparatuses of imperial rule. In so doing, it explores the intersections between the worlds of colonial governance, medical knowledge, vernacular markets and pharmaceutical business. Secondly, it outlines ways to narrate characteristics and enabling properties of non-humans (such as quinines and mosquitoes) while retaining a constructivist critique of scientism and empire. Thirdly, it shows how empire itself was reshaped and reinforced while occasioning the proliferation of categories and entities like malaria, quinine and mosquitoes
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Nonhuman empires
No full textThe themed section “Nonhuman Empires” contributes to a critique of anthropocentrism in the field of imperial history. It reveals the variety of ways in which the historical trajectories of nonhuman animals and empires both intersected and informed one another. Beyond merely rehabilitating nonhuman themes in conversations about imperial history, it provides a platform for rethinking both nonhumans and empires as they are envisioned conventionally in the historiography. This introductory article begins by situating this special section as a conversation between science studies and animal studies, on the one hand, and the historiography of empires, on the other. It then suggests ways to reconceptualize agency, subjects, nonhumans, and empire by combining certain shared concerns of subaltern studies and actor-network theory. Finally, it emphasizes the need to integrate postcolonial critiques with emerging scholarship about the posthuman
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