How Science Became Racist: The Case of the Third Great Plague Pandemic in South-East Asia

The History Department will be hosting a talk by Aro Velmet, a Ph. D. Candidate in History at NYU, on Thursday, February 5th, from 18:30-20:00, in Combes 104. Aro’s fascinating and urgent work intersects French history, the history of imperialism, the history of medicine, and the circulation of knowledge. There will be a brief response to the piece, and then we will open the floor to audience questions. There will also be food and drink after the talk. Please join us! You can find a brief description of the talk below.

How Science Became Racist: The Case of the Third Great Plague Pandemic in South-East Asia

The recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has once again demonstrated the difficulties of marshalling a successful international response to a deadly epidemic. In particular, the ignorance of Africans, and their resistance to expert knowledge has been singled out as a major problem, obstructing the work of international health workers and occasionally actually helping to spread the disease.

These stories bring to mind another occasion when a deadly epidemic put "primitive people" squarely in the spotlight of Western attention. In the 1890s, the bubonic plague decimated cities in South-East Asia - in China, in British-ruled India and in French Indochina. This talk looks at scientific responses to this epidemic, and suggests that talk about "local ignorance" may reveal more about the politics embedded in scientific claim-making than it reveals about the "locals" themselves. In the 1890s, French bacteriologists working in Hong Kong and Bombay criticized British authorities for mistreating Indian and Chinese locals in their handling of the public health response. Yet only a few years later, these very same scientists endorsed similarly coercive measures and made similar arguments about local ignorance in their own work in French Indochina. How did these critics of colonial violence turn into its proponents so quickly? And what can this episode in colonial history tell us about the relationship between imperial politics and scientific development?