ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Manipulating Biota, Engineering Healthscapes: Colonial Science & Medicine 1750-2000

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

What role has knowing the environment and harnessing its potential played in colonial health and governance over the last three centuries? Recognizing nature’s potential to kill, heal, or enhance, colonial authorities repeatedly sought to manipulate biota – be they plants, animals, or insects – to engineer control of the environment. This panel seeks first to investigate the pluralistic methods different cultures have employed to appropriate nature’s power. More specifically, how have colonial authorities transformed environmentally-oriented technologies into tools of governance in borderlands, where state authority is most fragile? We employ “healthscape” to highlight the role of spatial, ecological, and political powers in constructing experiences of health. Focusing on colonial hinterlands, we draw attention to the deliberately constructed terrains in which empires sought to regulate bodies, pathogens, crops, and labor.

Starting in the late 18th century Caribbean, Thomas C. Anderson argues that French administrators sought to circumvent Maroon and Indigenous dominance by systematically eradicating poisonous plants while promoting the growth of antidotal flora. Mika Hyman then addresses late 19th- and early 20th-century British attempts to produce disease-resistant cacao in Trinidad, which they viewed as an isolated island laboratory from which to extract desirable crop features to transplant to West Africa. Finally, Lauren Killingsworth addresses 20th-century US leprosy research on armadillos, which spilled out of the laboratory and decimated local populations, prompting researchers to leverage US foreign healthcare collaborations to ravage new populations of South American armadillos. Taken together, the panel proposes a provocation to view such cases not as isolated events driven solely by individual scientific ambitions, but rather as a continuous and ongoing project of colonial states to establish control over nature from the early modern to the modern world.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Andrea Rusnock

Commentator

• Andrea Rusnock

Individual Presentations

• Toxic Forests and Poisoned Gardens: Selective forestry, poison suppression, and Maroon mapping in colonial Martinique - Thomas C Anderson, Yale University

• Wild Cacao and Broken Branches: Disease, science and cacao agriculture in 20th century Trinidad - Mika Hyman, University of Cambridge

• ‘Man’s Best Friend in Leprosy Research’: The armadillo, environmental extraction, and the discovery of a zoonosis - Lauren Killingsworth, Yale University

Session Organizer

• Thomas C Anderson, Yale University