Much recent work on the history of colonial medicine argues that medicine was the handmaiden of colonial power and of capitalism. Dr Bell challenges this interpretation through careful investigation of the complicated relationship between medicine, politics, and capital in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Subverting the accepted wisdom that colonial medicine consisted primarily of white male doctors treating black patients, Dr Bell highlights the important role of women and of African and non-European practitioners of Western medicine. She moves beyond the realm of medical practice to consider the relationship between medical research and colonial power. And she argues that a new international medicine emerged during the interwar period, modifying and even supplanting existing colonial relationships. Frontiers of Medicine examines the physical, epidemiological, and professional boundaries that endlessly preoccupies colonial officials. Emphasising the tenuousness of colonial power, it includes chapters on midwifery training and female circumcision, on health and racial ideology, and on the quest to find the yellow fever virus in East Africa. Accepted wisdom maintains that colonial medicine consisted primarily of white doctors treating black patients, that it was mainly about medical practice, and that it was driven by colonial relationships. Dr Bell subverts these notions with detailed evidence of the participation of women and native Africans as trained medical personnel in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and demonstrates the tenuousness of colonial power in practice. There are chapters on midwifery training and female circumcision, on health and racial ideology, and on the quest to find yellow fever virus in East Africa. Dr Bell also investigates the relationship between colonial power and medical research, arguing that a new international medicine emerged during the inter-war period.

Civilizing Women is a riveting exploration of the disparate worlds of British colonial officers and the Muslim Sudanese they sought to remake into modern imperial subjects. Focusing on efforts to stop female circumcision in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1920 and 1946, Janice Boddy mines colonial documents and popular culture for ethnographic details to interleave with observations from northern Sudan, where women's participation in zâr spirit possession rituals provided an oblique counterpoint to colonial views. Written in engaging prose, Civilizing Women concerns the subtle process of "colonizing selfhood," the British women who undertook it, and those they hoped to reform. It suggests that efforts to suppress female circumcision were tied to the continuation of slavery and the rise of commercial cotton growing in Sudan, as well as to concerns about infant mortality and maternal health. Boddy traces maneuverings among political officers, teachers, missionaries, and medical personnel as they pursued their elusive goal, and describes their fraught relations with Egypt, Parliament, the Foreign Office, African nationalists, and Western feminists. In doing so, she sounds a cautionary note for contemporary interventionists who would flout local knowledge and belief.

Using case studies of cholera, plague, malaria, and yellow fever, this book analyzes how factors such as public health diplomacy, trade, imperial governance, medical technologies, and cultural norms operated within global and colonial conceptions of political and epidemiological risk to shape infectious disease policies in colonial India.

The essays in this Oxford Handbook rethink the modern history of one of the most important and influential countries in the Middle East--Egypt. For a country and region so often understood in terms of religion and violence, this work explores environmental, medical, legal, cultural, and political histories. It gives readers an excellent view of the current debates in Egyptian history.

Traces the history of the British General Medical Council to reveal the persistence of hierarchies of gender, national identity, and race in determining who was fit to practice British medicine.

‘Mark Harrison's book illuminates the threats posed by infectious diseases since 1500. He places these diseases within an international perspective, and demonstrates the relationship between European expansion and changing epidemiological patterns. The book is a significant introduction to a fascinating subject.’ Gerald N. Grob, Rutgers State University In this lively and accessible book, Mark Harrison charts the history of disease from the birth of the modern world around 1500 through to the present day. He explores how the rise of modern nation-states was closely linked to the threat posed by disease, and particularly infectious, epidemic diseases. He examines the ways in which disease and its treatment and prevention, changed over the centuries, under the impact of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and with the advent of scientific medicine. For the first time, the author integrates the history of disease in the West with a broader analysis of the rise of the modern world, as it was transformed by commerce, slavery, and colonial rule. Disease played a vital role in this process, easing European domination in some areas, limiting it in others. Harrison goes on to show how a new environment was produced in which poverty and education rather than geography became the main factors in the distribution of disease. Assuming no prior knowledge of the history of disease, Disease and the Modern World provides an invaluable introduction to one of the richest and most important areas of history. It will be essential reading for all undergraduates and postgraduates taking courses in the history of disease and medicine, and for anyone interested in how disease has shaped, and has been shaped by, the modern world.

The Battle for Algeria offers a new interpretation of the Algerian War (1954-1962) that highlights the social dimensions of the National Liberation Front's winning strategy, specifically its health care and humanitarianism programs, which targeted the local and international arenas and directly contributed to Algerian sovereignty.

This book is the first major work to explore the utility of the border as a theoretical, methodological, and interpretive construct for understanding colonial public health by considering African experiences in the Zimbabwe-Mozambique borderland. It examines the impact of colonial public health measures such as medical examinations/inspections, vaccinations, and border surveillance on African villagers in this borderland. The book asks whether the conjunction of a particular colonized society, a distinctive kind of colonialism, and a particular territorial border generated reluctance to embrace public health because of certain colonial circumstances which impeded the acceptance of therapeutic alternatives that were embraced by colonized people elsewhere. It asks historians to look elsewhere for similar kinds of histories involving racialized application of public health policies in colonial borderlands.

This book brings an important new perspective to the study of sex trafficking by considering the different types of social contracts which existed in the past that had sexual labour or activity as an inherent component. It outlines the nature of these social institutions – marriage, temporary marriage, debt bondage, and slavery – which were recognized in local law, carried no stigma, and endured for long periods. It discusses how labour pledged in return for a loan of cash or as a result of a punishment dictated by the state often included sexual labour, and how this could take the form of servicing the master of the house, his guests, or foreign travellers, who paid the debt-holder for the privilege, and how even wives of different ranks, temporary or permanent, and children, were pledged as sureties for loans. The book, which covers the modern states of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, argues that cultural norms are not static, that sexual contracts are more complicated than simply ‘marriage’ or ‘prostitution’, and that as trafficking for sexual purposes increases, those engaging in humanitarian intervention should improve their knowledge of the historical underpinnings of cultural understandings of familial and contractual obligations.

Explores the central role of the British Empire in developing transnational ideas, institutions and social movements of increasing scope and influence in the eras of high imperialism and the two world wars. Chapters follow transnational dynamics and debates over sovereignty in the domains of sexuality, law, politics, culture and religion.