“Health, From the Personal to the Global”

“Health, Globally” began as an extension of the World History Association’s annual meeting for 2021. The origins of this topic need not be explained. Indeed, we all are still adjusting to life in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Nor will it be a surprise to readers of Journal of World History that disease has long been a central issue for our field. When the president of the WHA, Laura Mitchell, suggested I consider using “Health, Globally” as a theme for a new special collection of the journal, it was an easy decision to make.

The history of global health is a personal one. For many years I have taught a course on the global history of disease. It was a natural evolution of interest after I began working on a history of the body in the eighteenth century, where disease provides a lens for understanding the attitude of physicians and officials as they attempt to control the body to resolve a (perhaps misunderstood) demographic crisis. Three of the articles in this collection are ones that I have used in my class since they were published; they are long-since integrated into my understanding of the topic.

This collection, however, is not intended as a personal tour of the history of disease. As was the case with our last collection, it once again draws together some of the journal’s most frequently cited and downloaded material alongside some less well-known contributions. Together, these articles present a multivalent approach to the study of global health. Some are driven by new scientific breakthroughs that allow previously held assumptions to be challenged and even rewritten. Some consider the history of health to be a debate about culture or the method of communicating knowledge. Some take a global approach to consider issues that touched every corner of the world, and others begin with specific local circumstances and consider how these episodes inform greater debates in world history. There is no one approach to use in our own work or with our students, but the research presented in these articles may revitalize our understanding of disease with new ideas, methods, or resources. We might all be tired of the relentless news cycle about the current positive testing rate or the fitful implementation of vaccination, but the importance of engaging health and disease with a historian’s critical awareness is now more important than ever.

James L. A. Webb’s article on malaria’s influence on the early history of Africa and George D. Sussman’s article on the impact of the plague in Central Africa begin this collection. Both reflect upon recent scientific innovations to offer new assessments of African history. Webb begins by pointing to his comprehensive approach using microbiology, archaeology, and archeobotany to reassess the historical record; Sussman relied upon gene sequencing to reexamine evidence related to the plague. While the specific fields they draw upon may be unfamiliar, their willingness to cross interdisciplinary lines in pursuit of new information will be familiar to many of us. I. J. Catanach’s article on the third plague pandemic and its impact on India, where it resulted in the death of at least 12.5 million people between 1896 and 1918, similarly was sparked by new information and approaches in other fields. Using that information, he reassessed the data on the transmission vectors of the disease to raise questions about earlier studies. The history of disease, in other words, does not only change as we learn more about the past, uncovering new evidence in archives and libraries, but also benefits from the improvement in medical knowledge. Each field can inform the other.

The history of colonialism is no less important to these articles than advances in scientific knowledge. Shawna Herzog’s analysis of the slave trade within colonial British settlements in Southeast Asia reveals health (and sexuality) as a contested ground. On one hand, British settlers engaged with debates about the morality of slavery, and yet, on the other, the reliance on slaves for sex work was thought to be a necessity to prevent the greater immorality of male same-sex sexuality...