Empires, the Nation and Tropical Medicine (1885 - 1960)
By the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the European powers resumed their colonial expansion, which was mainly directed towards Africa. At the same time, Pasteur, Koch and other researchers developed the germ theory, which radically change the practice of tropical medicine by focusing on the search of sera, vaccines and chemical "magic bullets" apt to fight against microorganisms. Colonial ventures were often entwined with these medical developments, and Western biomedical scientists focused on diseases that were hardly relevant to Europe (with some notable exceptions, like malaria) but posed major threats in the colonies or in strategic areas for European powers, such as yellow fever or sleeping sickness. Furthermore, a number of institutions played a crucial role in the colonial policies. The Pasteur Institute, for instance, created affiliated Institutes in the colonies and in areas where Paris had a strategic interest, but at the same time it promoted the image of Pasteur as a universal hero of mankind, contributing to construct the view of the French civilizing mission worldwide.
A number of authors have stressed the in-depth connection between the making of modern worldwide Empires and the creation of national identities in the longue durée (J. M. Fradera, The Imperial Nation; S. Conrad Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany). Empires, however, were not closed entities. They were complex and articulated spaces, where different nationalities often coexisted. The transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern laic state, for instance, led to the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, and even to the Armenian genocide. Furthermore, as Christopher Bayly stressed in his The Birth of the Modern World, many different agencies across the world contributed to the process of modernity. Old-style Chinese family firms and gentlemanly capitalist of Hamburg and New York were equally important in bringing about the expansion of world trade in the China Seas and West Asia.
This workshop aims to explore the role played by tropical medicine and by physicians and medical investigators within the intertwined process of nation building and the development and collapse of empires between the "scramble for Africa" and the decolonization process. Several issues will be addressed, notably: the mechanism of circulation of biomedical knowledge and know-how as well as of circulation of people; the meeting and exchange of Western medicine (as practices and concepts) with non-Western knowledge and medicine; the role of biomedical institutions in the process of the creation of the empires (both formal and informal) and the national identities; and on physicians and biomedical investigators as political actors. We expect the workshop to shed light on the global connections of tropical medicine as a discipline, and of the people and the institutions that established and promoted it.
Organizers: Daniele Cozzoli, Upf, Barcelona and Mauro Capocci, Sapienza University, Rome
attendance is free
Programme
November 22
14:30 - 15:00 Greetings and introduction: Tropical medicine, nation-building and Empire
15:00 - 15:45 Pratik Chakrabarti (University of Manchester): Tropical Medicine and Internationalism
15:45 - 16:30 Isabel Amaral (Universidad Nova de Lisboa) Tropical medicine and the consolidation of the Empire: reflecting on the Portuguese case (1902-1960)
16:30 - 17:00 Coffee break
17:00 - 17: 45 Mauro Capocci (Sapienza University, Rome) - Daniele Cozzoli (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona): Tropical Medicine, the Nation and the Colonial Expansion in the view of Italian Navy Physicians (1885 - 1915).
17: 45 - 18:30 Stephen Snelders (Utrecht University): Dutch colonial medicine and empire building in the tropics: The cases of leprosy and drug abuse in the Dutch East and West Indies compared.
20:30 Dinner
November 23
9:30 - 10:15 Edna Bonhomme (Max-Planck Institute für Wissenschaftgeschichte, Berlin): Sanitary Imperialism and Border Making in Late Nineteenth Century North Africa.
10:15 - 11:00 Francisco Javier Martínez (Universidade de Evora): Civilizing gap: the failed creation of a tropical medicine institute in Spain (1885-1957)
11:00 - 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 - 12:15 Sarah Ehlers (Deutsches Museum, Munich): German Tropical Medicine and its European Entanglements after the Great War.
12:15 - 13:00 Yubin Shen (Max-Planck Institute für Wissenschaftgeschichte, Berlin): State Medicine, and the People’s Health: Tropical Medicine and Control of Kala-azar in China, 1900-1960
13:00 - 14:30 Lunch
14:30 - 15:15 Anna Afanasyeva (Research University - Higher School of Economics, Moscow): Bacteriology, modernity and the state: Russian anti-plague campaigns in the Kazakh steppe (late 19th and early 20th centuries).
15:15 - 16:00 Matheus Duarte (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris): Circulatory laboratories: connections, competition and knowledge production in the first years of the bubonic plague pandemic (1894-1907)
16:00 - 16:45 Closing remarks