Malarial Subjects
Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909

This book examines how and why British imperial rule shaped scientific knowledge about malaria and its cures in nineteenth-century India. This title is also available as Open Access.

Rohan Deb Roy (Author)

9781316623619, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 November 2019

348 pages, 40 b/w illus.
23 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

i

Malaria was considered one of the most widespread disease-causing entities in the nineteenth century. It was associated with a variety of frailties far beyond fevers, ranging from idiocy to impotence. And yet, it was not a self-contained category. The reconsolidation of malaria as a diagnostic category during this period happened within a wider context in which cinchona plants and their most valuable extract, quinine, were reinforced as objects of natural knowledge and social control. In India, the exigencies and apparatuses of British imperial rule occasioned the close interactions between these histories. In the process, British imperial rule became entangled with a network of nonhumans that included, apart from cinchona plants and the drug quinine, a range of objects described as malarial, as well as mosquitoes. Malarial Subjects explores this history of the co-constitution of a cure and disease, of British colonial rule and nonhumans, and of science, medicine and empire. This title is also available as Open Access.

Introduction: side-effects of empire
1. 'Fairest of Peruvian maids': planting cinchonas in British India
2. 'An imponderable poison': shifting geographies of a diagnostic category
3. 'A cinchona disease': making Burdwan fever
4. 'Beating about the bush': manufacturing quinine in a colonial factory
5. Of 'losses gladly borne': feeding quinine, warring mosquitoes
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Asian history [HBJF], Regional & national history [HBJ]