Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism

By Sheldon Watts

Book Overview

"One of the best portrayals of life in Europe and the Islamic world during the medieval Great Plague. . . . Watts offers solid, stunning examples of Western idiocy that created superhighways for once-obscure microbes, leading to horrendous epidemics. . . . A perspective that Western, particularly Caucasian, policy-makers would do well to comprehend."--Laurie Garrett, Foreign Affairs "Fascinating . . . [Watts] exposes to daylight the dire effect of the elites' often misinformed conception of these diseases, and how they, the elites, manipulated epidemiological crises to their advantage."--Alfred Crosby, Washington Post 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. This book will become the standard account of the way diseases--arising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of each--were interpreted in Western Europe and in the colonized world, and offers an interesting historical perspective for a world dealing with the spread of COVID-19.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300080875
• ISBN13: 9780300080872
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

From a different point of view

Seldon Watts embarked on a very difficult and higly political issue. You may agree or disagree that imperialist powers used contagious diseases as yet another weapon but everyone has to agree that this is a new perspective in viewing history. For example, i was amazed by his analysis in Leprosy and found it to be logic, even though i don't have his sources available. Sometimes the scientific data seem a bit weak but if you want details on each and every disease there other books to consult. This book talks about politics. I see this great book as a cry from a scientist of the ''Third world'' who reminds that science (and charity) is not as neutral as we sometimes consider it to be. Personally i believe it is a ''must'', even if you disagree with the author politically.

solid and interesting

I found this book an excellent companion to earlier books on the subject (McNeill, Crosby), as it puts diseases in human society in a historic social/cultural and political context. I started out sceptical but then got caught by the book and its analyis was for me an eye-opener on how (Western) medicine was a tool often used for ends that had nothing to do with physical well-being, sickness prevention and care. The end conclusions on economics and health economics i do not share at all, i think the author gets carried away a bit and goes way too fast to condemn economists here, (guess what my profession is). Definitely worth while.

This is one of the most important books ever published

Shelson Watts' Epidemics and History is an absolutely indispensible book. It is no exaggeraton to call it one of the most important books ever published. Watts is fearless in pulling the curtains back on the West's delusions and self-told lies. The book shows the connections among racism, imperialism, corporatism, capitalism, poverty, and disease. The conclusions are shocking, but it his penetrating analysis which renders what is shocking also understandable. Read this book.