The Political Ecology of Epidemics in the Third World

This essay argues that Late Victorian Holocaust is as important a contribution to medical history as environmental history. It relates Davis’s entanglement of the environmental and epidemiological aftermath of colonialism to transatlantic medical histories, and posits his work as a pioneering study of the disease ecologies of the Indian Ocean region in the wake of its colonization. The essay also distinguishes Davis’s scholarship from what it calls the ‘epidemiological model’ of writing medical histories, an imperial model of understanding diseases that often persists in current scholarship. It notes his theoretical deftness in moving beyond the binaries of nature and history for analyzing colonial epidemics.