New Book Forum

Sujata Mukherjee’s groundbreaking study stresses “the biopolitical aspect of colonial governmentality, racial attributes of liberal colonial empire, attempts at the making of colonial self by Indian reformers who sought modernization through vernaculization of medical knowledge, and operating of biopower, by viewing all these changes through the lens of gender” (xvii). Zooming in on the contributions of female Bengali medical practitioners in Indian medical history as well as the question of how the spread and discussion of Western medicine affected the lives of Indian women, the author follows calls to ‘provincialize’ colonial medicine.

In his 2019 monography, Hans Pols explores the history of Indonesian physicians who became active in the Indonesian nationalist movement throughout the late 19^th century into the age of decolonization. Tracing back physicians’ activities in educational institutions, nationalist organizations, print media, and political institutions, Pols convincingly illuminates the relationship between medical education, colonial modernity, anti-colonial nationalism, and the failure of public health in independent Indonesia.

Sleeping sickness was among the most common causes of death in 20^th-century colonized Africa. Coinciding with breakthroughs in tropical medicine at the beginning of the century, attempts to tackle the disease triggered a series of biomedical experiments at the intersection between science, economy, politics and colonial violence. Sarah Ehlers’ 2019 publication engages with the making of modern biomedicine in its colonial contexts. As her findings suggest, the development of biomedicine was by no means the result of the efforts of individual nation states, but rather a transnational European and deeply colonial endeavour.

Tim Lockley’s recent study on the history of military medicine in the West India Regiments in the 18^th and 19^th centuries sheds new light on the development of racial thought in the Atlantic World. By focusing on surgeons’ shifting perceptions of the 100’000+ black recruits deployed in the British military in the West Indies, Lockley demonstrates the influence of medical accounts in shaping European notions of black bodies.

Green Unpleasant Land considers the history of the English countryside through the lens of Britain’s colonial endeavors. Rather than a remote place of retreat from the world, the book argues, rural England was “a place of conflict and global expansion.” The book is accessibly written and incorporates elements of Fowler’s own family relationship to transatlantic enslavement. By uncovering the English countryside’s “repressed colonial past,” the book reveals the importance of rural connections to the colonies as sources of ideas about Englishness.