Book ID: CBB544344699

Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (2020)

unapi

Velmet, Aro (Author)


Oxford University Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 324
Language: English

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, Syriantraders, 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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Reviewed By

Review Gabriel Galvez-Behar (2023) Review of "Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World". Metascience: An International Review Journal for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (pp. 33-37). unapi

Review Christos Lynteris (2022) Review of "Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 114-116). unapi

Review Christos Lynteris (2022) Review of "Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 114-116). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB544344699/

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Authors & Contributors
Velmet, Aro
Costanza Bonelli
Martin Robert
Guba, David A., Jr.
Duffy, Andrea
Chapman, Herrick E.
Concepts
Public health
Imperialism
Hygiene
France, colonies
Bacteriology
Science and politics
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
Places
France
North Africa
Italy
Australia
Tropics
South Asia
Institutions
University of Paris V
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
Harvard University
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
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