Awards

• Winner of Honorable Mention, 2020 - 2021 Laurence Wylie Prize, NYU Institute of French Studies Honorable Mention, Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize, French Colonial Historical Society.
• Winner of Honorable Mention, Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize, French Colonial Historical Society.

Overview

In the 1890s, the Pasteur Institute established a network of laboratories that stretched across France's empire, from Indochina to West Africa. Quickly, researchers at these laboratories became central to France's colonial project, helping officials monopolize industries, develop public health codes, establish disease containment measures, and arbitrate political conflicts around questions of labor rights, public works, and free association. Pasteur's Empire shows how the scientific prestige of the Pasteur Institute came to depend on its colonial laboratories, and how, conversely, the institutes themselves became central to colonial politics. This book argues that decisions as small as the isolation of a particular yeast or the choice of a laboratory animal could have tremendous consequences on the lives of Vietnamese and African subjects, who became the consumers of new vaccines or industrially fermented intoxicants. Simultaneously, global forces, such as the rise of international standards and American competitors pushed Pastorians to their imperial laboratories, where they could conduct studies that researchers in France considered too difficult or controversial. Chapters follow not just Alexandre Yersin's studies of the plague, Charles Nicolle's public health work in Tunisia, and Jean Laigret's work on yellow fever in Dakar, but also the activities of Vietnamese doctors, African students and politicians, Syrian traders, and Chinese warlords. It argues that a specifically Pastorian understanding of microbiology shaped French colonial politics across the world, allowing French officials to promise hygienic modernity while actually committing to little development. In bringing together global history, imperial history, and science and technology studies, Pasteur's Empire deftly integrates micro and macro analyses into one connected narrative that sheds critical light on a key era in the history of medicine.

Full Product Details

9780190072827

Table of Contents

Reviews

This superb book moves beyond the narrow confines of the immediate legacy of Pasteur and others following his approach. The research is thorough and draws on a wealth of original archival material in addition to published sources. Pasteur's Empire is an engaging and important contribution to the history of bacteriology and its relationship with Empire. * James Stark, University of Leeds * Velmet explores the colonial past of global health. He shows how the disciples of Louis Pasteur found in the French colonies a space of opportunity, where their techniques and knowledge could help 'fix' the Empire. Solid and accessible, Velmet's Pasteur's Empire demonstrates that medical history can be both theoretically ambitious and significant for our present. * Guillaume Lachenal, Sciences Po *

Author Information

Aro Velmet is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

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