Epidemic Encounters Communities And Practices In The Colonial World

Colonial conquest and the subsequent introduction of diverse diseases has reshaped the destiny of communities around the globe for centuries. Drawing on untapped archival material on India, Africa, and Australia, these essays offer a counternarrative of events and establish im...

Colonial conquest and subsequent introduction of diverse diseases has reshaped the destiny of communities around the globe for centuries. Drawing on untapped archival material on India, Africa and Australia, the essays, offer a counter-narrative of events establishing important links between existing and emerging diseases in our global world.

Shows how the investigation of local outbreaks of typhoid fever in Victorian Britain led to the emergence of the modern discipline of epidemiology as the leading science of public health

A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.

Introduction : Britain's empire of camps -- Concentrating the "dangerous classes" : the cultural and material foundations of British camps -- "Barbed wire deterrents" : detention and relief at Indian famine campus, 1876-1901 -- "A source of horror and dread" : plague camps in Indian and South Africa, 1896-1901 -- Concentrated humanity : the management and anatomy of colonial campus, c. 1900 -- Camps in a time of war : civilian concentration in southern Africa, 1900-1901 -- "Only matched in times of famine and plague" : life and death in the concentration camps -- "A system steadily perfected" : camp reform and the "new geniuses from India", 1901-1903 -- Epilogue : Camps go global : lessons, legacies, and forgotten solidarities

"Carrying the inquiry into zones previous itineraries have typically avoided—the creation of races, sexual relations, invention of tradition, and regional rulers' strategies for dealing with the conquerors—the book brings out features of European expansion and contraction we have not seen well before."—Charles Tilly, The New School for Social Research "What is important about this book is its commitment to shaping theory through the careful interpretation of grounded, empirically-based historical and ethnographic studies. . . . By far the best collection I have seen on the subject."—Sherry B. Ortner, Columbia University

Featuring case studies of prehistoric and historic sites from Mesoamerica, China, the Philippines, the Pacific, Egypt, and elsewhere, Frontiers of Colonialism makes the surprising claim that colonialism can and should be compared across radically different time periods and locations. This volume challenges archaeologists to rethink the two major dichotomies of European versus non-European and prehistoric versus historic colonialism, which can be limiting, self-imposed boundaries. By bringing together contributors working in different regions and time periods, this volume examines the variability in colonial administrative strategies, local forms of resistance to cultural assimilation, hybridized cultural traditions, and other cross-cultural interactions within a global, comparative framework. Taken together these essays argue that crossing these frontiers of study will give anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians more power to recognize and explain the highly varied local impacts of colonialism.