Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820-1909

Abstract

In 1902, scientist Patrick Manson likened malaria in Africa to the mythical three-headed dog-beast Cerberus, which guarded the gates to the river Styx in the Greek underworld; malaria similarly guarded the continent itself.1 Ronald Ross would be similarly dramatic in his description of malaria, writing of the disease in a letter to his wife as, “O million-murdering Death.”2 More than a century has passed, and malaria's significance endures. Certainly, malaria is among the ur-examples of how Empire was bounded and shaped by disease. Any historian familiar with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India especially understands the importance of malaria and the centrality of “Peruvian bark” to the very foundations and sustenance of Empire. Indeed, cinchona had very early on become perceived as a part of the healing power, and implicitly, the civilizing mission, of Empire. Rohan Deb Roy’s meticulously researched and richly detailed book examines malaria and cinchona at the intersection of material culture, global history, and animal histories, with a meticulous sense of space and mobility. In Chapter 1, Deb Roy tracks the mobilities of the plant and its derivatives across British, French, and Dutch imperial networks. and examines the porous boundaries among medicine, botany, chemistry and commerce, as well as its centrality in sustaining both the material and discursive realities of Empire.