Chikungunya and Epidemic Disease in the Indian Ocean World

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, David Arnold (1991) published a pioneering article on the medical history of the Indian Ocean. In his wide-ranging essay, he emphasized the impact of European intrusion into the Indian Ocean world (IOW) after 1500, noting especially that “the emergence of India as the lynch pin of British power and trade in the East was of great epidemiological significance for the rest of the region and indeed the wider world beyond” (ibid., 7). Arnold particularly acknowledged the importance of maritime movement, whether by traders, soldiers, pilgrims or migrant labourers, as a central element in disease dispersion—what he called “epidemiological routes and conjunctures”—during the post-contact period (ibid., 9). More recently, Amina Issa (2006) has built on Arnold’s essay by arguing for the significance of indigenous sailing ships and the diffusion of epidemic disease in Indian Ocean ports in the nineteenth century before the advent of steamships. In this chapter, I propose to jump forward in time to the contemporary period by examining the chikungunya epidemic that swept across the IOW in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and to ask whether it is possible to apply what we have learned from studying the origins and spread of this disease to improving our understanding of earlier epidemic diseases in the IOW.