Malaria was considered one of the most widespread disease-causing entities in the nineteenth century. It was associated with a variety of frailties far beyond fevers, ranging from idiocy to impotence. And yet, it was not a self-contained category. The reconsolidation of malaria as a diagnostic category during this period happened within a wider context in which cinchona plants and their most valuable extract, quinine, were reinforced as objects of natural knowledge and social control. In India, the exigencies and apparatuses of British imperial rule occasioned the close interactions between these histories. In the process, British imperial rule became entangled with a network of nonhumans that included, apart from cinchona plants and the drug quinine, a range of objects described as malarial, as well as mosquitoes. Malarial Subjects explores this history of the co-constitution of a cure and disease, of British colonial rule and nonhumans, and of science, medicine and empire. This title is also available as Open Access.

Contents

• Malarial Subjects
• SCIENCE IN HISTORY
  Editors: Simon J. Schaffer and James A. Secord.
• [Dedication]
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Side Effects of Empire
• 1. ‘Fairest of Peruvian Maids’: Planting Cinchonas in British India
  • Discovery of an Event
  • ‘Pleasantest Episode of British Rule in India’
  • Distant and Delicate
  • Geographies of Plantations: Anderson in Java
  • Tours of Ambition
  • Hetero-Genus: Cinchona ‘Experiments’ in British India
  • ‘Indian Plantations’
  • ‘A Botanical Curiosity’
  • Conclusion
• 2. ‘An Imponderable Poison’: Shifting Geographies of a Diagnostic Category
  • ‘Insensible and Imponderable Poison’
  • The ‘First Book’ and Its Author
  • Colonising Malaria, Malarial Colonies
  • Malarial Governance: Intervention, Compensation, Circulation
  • Regions and Races
  • Conclusion
• 3. ‘A Cinchona Disease’: Making Burdwan Fever
  • ‘Malarial Subjects’
  • ‘Cinchona Disease’
  • ‘… Opportunity of the Epidemic …’
  • ‘Local’
  • ‘Undergrowths’
  • ‘Agriculture’
  • ‘Draining Bengal’
  • ‘Travelling Epidemic’
  • Conclusion
• 4. ‘Beating About the Bush’: Manufacturing Quinine in a Colonial Factory
  • An Exclusive Drug
  • ‘The Authority to Judge’
  • Contesting ‘Pure Quinine’
  • An Economy of ‘Substitutes’
  • Judging the Howards
  • The Return of Quinine
  • Cinchona Febrifuge: The ‘Impure’ as ‘Desirable’
  • ‘A Botanical Puzzle’
  • An ‘Experiment’ in London
  • An Expensive Substitute
  • From ‘Discovery’ to ‘Invention’
  • Conclusion
• 5. Of ‘Losses Gladly Borne’: Feeding Quinine, Warring Mosquitoes
  • ‘Cheapest Possible Quinine’
  • ‘Within the Reach of the Poorest’
  • Policing Purity
  • ‘War of Mosquitoes’
  • Countable and the Accountable
  • ‘Experimental Demonstration Camps’
  • Conclusion
• 6. Epilogue: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans
  • A Cure and Its Disease
  • ‘Morbus Bengalensis’
  • Nonhuman Empire
• Bibliography

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First published 2017

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