Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Hardcover. Very good/very good. Hardcover. 9 1/2" X 6 1/4". xvi, 400pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. Black paper over boards with spine lettered in gilt. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is sound.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

This book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity-plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malaria-over the last six centuries. It is also much more. Sheldon Watts applies a wholly original perspective to the study of global disease, exploring the connections between the movement of epidemics and the manifestations of imperial power in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and in European homelands. He argues that not only did Western medicine fail to cure the diseases that its own expansion engendered, but that imperial medicine was in fact an agent and tool of empire.

Watts examines the relationship between the pre-modern and modern medical profession and such epidemic disasters as the plague in western Europe and the Middle East; leprosy in the medieval West and in the nineteenth-century tropical world; the spread of smallpox to the New World in the age of exploration; syphilis and nonsexual diseases in Europe's connection with Asia; cholera in India during British rule; and malaria in the Atlantic Basin during the eras of slavery and Social Darwinism.(Publisher).