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Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World

Autor Aro Velmet
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 20 feb 2020
In the 1890s, the Pasteur Institute established a network of laboratories that stretched across France's empire, from Indochina to West Africa. Quickly, researchers at these laboratories became central to France's colonial project, helping officials monopolize industries, develop public health codes, establish disease containment measures, and arbitrate political conflicts around questions of labor rights, public works, and free association. Pasteur's Empire shows how the scientific prestige of the Pasteur Institute came to depend on its colonial laboratories, and how, conversely, the institutes themselves became central to colonial politics. This book argues that decisions as small as the isolation of a particular yeast or the choice of a laboratory animal could have tremendous consequences on the lives of Vietnamese and African subjects, who became the consumers of new vaccines or industrially fermented intoxicants. Simultaneously, global forces, such as the rise of international standards and American competitors pushed Pastorians to their imperial laboratories, where they could conduct studies that researchers in France considered too difficult or controversial. Chapters follow not just Alexandre Yersin's studies of the plague, Charles Nicolle's public health work in Tunisia, and Jean Laigret's work on yellow fever in Dakar, but also the activities of Vietnamese doctors, African students and politicians, Syrian traders, and Chinese warlords. It argues that a specifically Pastorian understanding of microbiology shaped French colonial politics across the world, allowing French officials to promise hygienic modernity while actually committing to little development. In bringing together global history, imperial history, and science and technology studies, Pasteur's Empire deftly integrates micro and macro analyses into one connected narrative that sheds critical light on a key era in the history of medicine.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780190072827
ISBN-10: 0190072822
Pagini: 324
Ilustrații: 16 illustrations and 3 maps
Dimensiuni: 163 x 246 x 31 mm
Greutate: 0.66 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Recenzii

With his Pasteur's Empire, Aro Velmet makes an undeniably useful contributionto such a history.
French Colonial Historical Society's Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize Honorable Mention
Velmet explores the colonial past of global health. He shows how the disciples of Louis Pasteur found in the French colonies a space of opportunity, where their techniques and knowledge could help 'fix' the Empire. Solid and accessible, Velmet's Pasteur's Empire demonstrates that medical history can be both theoretically ambitious and significant for our present.
This superb book moves beyond the narrow confines of the immediate legacy of Pasteur and others following his approach. The research is thorough and draws on a wealth of original archival material in addition to published sources. Pasteur's Empire is an engaging and important contribution to the history of bacteriology and its relationship with Empire.
One of the great contributions of Pasteur's Empire is to show how the action of these famous bacteriologists attached to the Pastorian school gave rise to tensions and even rivalries.
Pasteur's Empire casts new light on a number of aspects of the history of the Pasteur Institute. The book, however, gives an oversimplified and one-dimensional portrait of a complex history. An appraisal of the role the Pasteur Institute played in the making of the French colonial empire requires a more in-depth study of the much richer and articulated history of the Institute and of its researchers, including the fact that microbiology changed profoundly between the 1930s and the 1960s with the "molecular revolution." It also requires an in-depth engagement with the historiography of modern France and of modern empires.

Notă biografică

Aro Velmet is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California.