Epidemics And History: Disease, Power And Imperialism

A wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity - plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera and yellow fever/malaria - over the last six centuries. Sheldon Watts applies his perspective to the study of global disease, exploring the connections between the movement of epidemics and the manifestations of imperial power in the Americas, Asia, Africa and in European homelands. He shows how perceptions of whom a disease targeted changed over time and affected various political and medical responses. The author argues that western medicine failed to cure the diseases that its expansion engendered, and that imperial medicine was an agent and tool of empire. Watts examines the relationship between the pre-modern medical profession and epidemic disasters like the plague in western Europe and the Middle East, leprosy in the medieval west and in the 19th-century tropical world, the spread of smallpox during European exploration, syphilis and nonsexual diseases’ connection with Asia, cholera in India during British rule, and malaria in the Atlantic basin during slavery and social Darwinism eras. He investigates the link between environmental changes and disease, and between disease and society, in both material terms and in the minds and spirits of rulers and the governed. This book chronicles how diseases, arising from chance or reckless environmental change, were interpreted in western Europe and the colonized world.