-
Anticolonial Climates: Physiology, Ecology, and Global Population, 1920s–1950s
- Bulletin of the History of Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 86, Number 4, Winter 2012
- pp. 596-626
- 10.1353/bhm.2012.0075
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian economist, ecologist, and anticolonial nationalist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968). It argues that the explanatory context was mid-twentieth-century discussion of global population growth, which raised questions of density and belonging to land. Ecology offered a new language and scientific system within which people and place were conceptually integrated, in this instance to anticolonial ends.