The Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. This interdisciplinary work presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era. The essays explore theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. This book will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.

This interdisciplinary work, the first of two volumes, presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the ninth century to the early modern period. Themes include theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. Overall, the books argue that, throughout the period of study, the Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. The two volumes are the first to use the Indian Ocean World as a geographical and conceptual framework for the study of disease. It will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.

Introducing materiality into the study of the history of medicine, this volume hones in on communities across the Indian Ocean World and explores how they understood and engaged with health and medical commodities. Opening up spatial dimensions and challenging existing approaches to knowledge, power and the market, it defines 'therapeutic commodity' and explores how different materials were understood and engaged with in various settings and for a number of purposes. Offering new spatial realms within which the circulation of commodities created new regimes of meaning, Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World demonstrates how medicinal substances have had immediate and far-reaching economic and political consequences in various capacities. From midwifery and umbilical cords, to the social spaces of soap, perfumes in early modern India and remedies for leprosy, this volume considers a vast range of material culture in medicinal settings to better understand the history of medicine and its role in global connections since the early 17th century.

This volume views the study of disease as essential to understanding the key historical developments underpinning the foundation of contemporary Indian Ocean World (IOW) societies. The interplay between disease and climatic conditions, natural and manmade crises and disasters, human migration and trade in the IOW reveals a wide range of perceptions about disease etiologies and epidemiologies, and debates over the origin, dispersion and impact of disease form a central focus in these essays. Incorporating a wide scope of academic and scientific angles including history, social and medical anthropology, archaeology, epidemiology and paleopathology, this collection focuses on diseases that spread across time, space and cultures. It scrutinizes disease as an object, and engages with the subjectivities of afflicted inhabitants of, and travellers to, the IOW.

This book breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to examine contemporary Indian Ocean worlds. It reconfigures the Indian Ocean as a space for conceptual and theoretical relationality based on social science and humanities scholarship, thus moving away from an area-based and geographical approach to Indian Ocean studies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines focus on keywords such as relationality, space/place, quotidian practices, and new networks of memory and maps to offer original insights to reimagine the Indian Ocean. While the volume as a whole considers older histories, mobilities, and relationships between places in Indian Ocean worlds, it is centrally concerned with new connectivities and layered mappings forged in the lived experiences of individuals and communities today. The chapters are steeped in ethnographic, multi-modal, and other humanities methodologies that examine different sources besides historical archives and textual materials, including everyday life, cities, museums, performances, the built environment, media, personal narratives, food, medical practices, or scientific explorations. An important contribution to several fields, this book will be of interest to academics of Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asian linkages, inter-Asian exchanges, Afro-Arab crossroads, Asian studies, African studies, Anthropology, History, Geography, and International Relations.

This book is about a ‘Small Island’, namely Mauritius in the southwestern Indian Ocean. It is also about a ‘Large Ocean’, the Indian Ocean world—its peoples, histories and cultures. It casts light on the life of an island through what is known not only about the island itself, but also through what is known about the wider Indian Ocean world. It is also about the Indian Ocean world in that it focuses on an island, which, in many senses and dimensions, is not only a model of, but in some respects also a model for wider developments and features of relevance to the Indian Ocean world as a whole.

An innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little attention to the role that cargoes have played in connecting the disparate parts of this vast oceanic world. Drawing from the work of anthropologists, geographers, and historians, Cargoes in Motion tells the story of how material objects have informed and continue to shape processes of exchange across the Indian Ocean. By following selected cargoes through both space and time, this book makes an important and innovative contribution to Indian Ocean studies. The multidisciplinary approach deepens our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Indian Ocean world by showing how transoceanic connectivity has been driven not only by economic, social, cultural, and political factors but also by the materiality of the objects themselves. Essays by: Edward A. Alpers Fahad Ahmad Bishara Eva-Maria Knoll Karl-Heinz Kohl Lisa Jenny Krieg Pedro Machado Rupert Neuhöfer Mareike Pampus Hannah Pilgrim Burkhard Schnepel Hanne Schönig Tansen Sen Steven Serels Julia Verne Kunbing Xiao

Across Colonial Lines takes a multi-perspective approach to the study of empire and commodities, and encourages readers to look at commodity histories in alternative spatial and temporal contexts. It offers a comparative understanding of commodities in the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. Highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks, this book situates commodities like gold, coffee, tea and indigo, to name a few, within pre-existing networks of labour, consumption and knowledge production. It explores the nexus between the local and the global, and highlights the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and even consumers in creating regional circulations within a global political economy. In this volume, commodity networks are not just sites of production and trade, but also of political control, social organisation and consumption choices. They provide the impetus for globalisation from as early as the thirteenth century. Each chapter takes an individual commodity to illustrate the history of commodity transmission within imperial contexts. From early modern Venetian commerce to the trade networks of the Eurasian world; from the trading ambitions of British sailors to Portuguese global imperial ambitions; from the cross-imperial knowledge networks of indigo to the assertion of indigenous agency in Angola; and from the commodification of labour to the experience of tourism in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean World, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire building across varied yet connected geographies and chronologies.

The focus of this volume is the history of imperial science between 1600 and 1960, although some essays reach back prior to 1600 and the section about decolonization includes post-1960 material. Each contributed chapter, written by an expert in the field, provides an analytical review essay of the field, while also providing an overview of the topic. There is now a rich literature developed by historians of science as well as scholars of empire demonstrating the numerous ways science and empire grew together, especially between 1600 and 1960.

This volume interrogates the foundational categories that have come to define medical science in modern South Asia. It seeks to probe issues such as what constitutes the ‘medical’, in which context, and who defines it. This is achieved through case studies that range from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, from colonial Bengal and British Burma to present-day Andaman Islands and Ladakh. By examining the close interactions between political authorities, corporeal knowledge, and objects of governance in a sustained manner, the domains of the medical and the non-medical are revealed to be more blurred and porous than apparent. This provides us with new perspectives on the co-production of medicine and social worlds by actors and agencies in specific times and places.