In the fall of 2010 I designed and taught a graduate course called Drugs and Germs in Global History and Empire. The course began in the period just before the European voyages of exploration and ended in the late twentieth century. It followed drugs across oceans and borders from when they became important commodities in the emerging global trade of the early modern period. It also examined social and cultural contexts of and meanings ascribed to drug use by different peoples in different times. In particular, it examined what happens to patterns of use as a drug moves from one social, cultural, and economic setting to another. Drugs of interest included opium, tobacco, chocolate, coffee, and tea in the early modern period as these drugs were used in China, India, Mesoamerica, and Europe. Later readings focused on cocaine trafficking and use in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Latin America and the United States.
As people increasingly traveled long distances around the world, bacteria and viruses traveled with them to places where populations were unfamiliar with them. Resulting epidemics sparked panic as well as more orderly attempts to control and prevent epidemic outbreaks. Over time and with new or continued exposure, people and pathogens evolved into new forms of relationship. Some species purposely brought to new lands also altered ecological arrangements. Among the diseases analyzed in specific settings, especially port cities in several continents, were cholera, malaria, and bubonic plague.
Both drugs and disease posed challenges that elicited state action. Drugs could be sources of state revenue, or objects of concern based on their effects on behavior, or both; they could also be medicines. Disease could cause social upheaval and sap productivity. States acted vigorously to attempt to structure the market channels in which drugs moved and to control the spread of infectious disease. Moreover, states sometimes responded to drug use and disease outbreak in similar ways. Both drug use and disease elicited state attempts to control subjects’ or citizens’ behavior. The spread of drug use in populations was compared to the spread of disease. The course examined how attempts to control drug trade and disease incidence influenced not just the actions of states but also the bases for states’ claims to power and authority.
Both drug compounds and pathogenic organisms are fundamental units that became foundational for the sciences of pharmacology, bacteriology, and virology. Readings on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought the scientific isolation of compounds and unicellular organisms into focus as we followed organic chemists’ innovations in the production of new medicines and contentions over the amount of explanatory weight given role of bacteria and viruses in explicating disease prevalence. Both drugs and germs enabled us to discuss changing relationship between science and the state.
Here’s what we read, with a few comments. I have added the full syllabus at the end of this list of each week’s readings; it contains recommended additional readings.
WEEK 1 Charles E. Rosenberg. “Disease and Social Order in America: Perceptions and Expectations.” In Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox., eds. AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 12-32.
Günter B. Risse. “Epidemics and History: Ecological Perspectives.” In Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox., eds. AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 33-66.
Howard Becker. “Becoming a Marihuana User” and “Marijuana and Social Control.” In Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963), 41-78.
Andrew Sherratt. “Introduction: Peculiar Substances.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 1-10.
Jordan Goodman and Paul E. Lovejoy. “Afterword.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 255-60.
These articles laid a theoretical framework for subsequent readings and discussions. Rosenberg introduced students to the social construction of disease. Risse’s construct of the changing ecology of disease incorporates human actions and social structures along with biological and environmental forces and conditions to explicate changing patterns of infectious disease. Becker highlights the malleable and socially learned nature of drug effects. The introduction and afterword to Consuming Habits lay out how the study of drug production, marketing, and use can highlight economic, scientific, cultural, and other important aspects of social life.
WEEK 2 Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th Anniversary Edition. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003. (First edition was published in 1972.)
This classic introduced the kind of ecological history that has burgeoned in recent decades. It introduced the Americas and recounted the effects of the early trans-Atlantic voyages that set the stage for linking all the continents into an interlocking set of markets.
WEEK 3 Marcy Norton. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
A recent exemplar showing off the maturity of drug history as a field. Norton reconstructs uses of tobacco and chocolate in pre-Columbian Mexico and the Caribbean; she discusses how arrival of Europeans changed drug use patterns and social relations. She then follows the drugs across the Atlantic and traces their insinuation into different social contexts in Europe. Her book illustrates the wide range of sources historians use to reconstruct cultural activities like drug use, including art works and drug use devices such as pipes.
WEEK 4 Rudi Matthee. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
This book took me the furthest outside of history I know well. Like Norton, Matthee mines visual evidence to suggest how drug use helped organize social relations. He discusses alcohol use by royalty; tobacco use so valued that special servants followed their masters, both on horses, to convey the smoking apparatus; and, especially, tea use in a range of settings. His discussion of the meanings of social spaces where different drugs were used set us up for the later (in the sequence of this syllabus) discussion of European coffee houses.
WEEK 5 Paul Winther. “Introduction” and “The Wider Context: Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire.” In Winther, Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 1-32 and 323-42.
Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. “Introduction: Opium’s History in China.” In Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1-27.
Carl A. Trocki. “Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia.” In Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 79-104.
David Bello. “Opium in Xinjiang and Beyond.” In Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 127-51.
These articles provide a sampling of a profusion of recent literature on drug use and disease in Asia and the Pacific. Winther’s book focuses tightly on the documents generated by the 1895 British Royal Commission on Opium. Its exhaustive analysis of individual pieces of testimony brought before the commission makes it unsuitable for a broadly structured graduate course, but the introduction and conclusion link opium (as a treatment) and malaria and put both in the context of the British imperial enterprise with attention to, among other things, the views of British and Indian physicians practicing in India. Opium Regimes is a marvelously diverse collection of recent historical essays on opium in Asia. Trocki and Bello each wrote full books; including their articles here introduced students to their work.
WEEK 6 Alexander von Gernet. “Nicotian Dreams: The Prehistory and Early History of Tobacco in Eastern North America.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 65-85.
Jordan Goodman. “Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 121-41.
Woodruff D. Smith. “From Coffeehouse to Parlour: The Consumption of Coffee, Tea and Sugar in North-Western Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 142-57.
Bin Yang. “The Zhang on Chinese Southern Frontiers: Disease Constructions, Environmental Changes, and Imperial Colonization.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84 (Sep. 2010)2:163-92.
Von Gernet stresses how, even as forms of drug use travel to new social and cultural places, the explanatory framing of their effects can change dramatically. Although Norton (in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures) challenges this view to some extent, von Gernet usefully sets tobacco use in a global perspective. Goodman and Smith discuss soft stimulants such as tea and tobacco in 17th and 18th century Europe. They were among the first historians to note the importance of drugs (coffee, tea, tobacco, cacao) in the establishment of global markets in the mercantile age. All produced stimulant effects valued by the emerging bourgeoisie. All traveled well, whether as seeds or as cured leaves. (The inability to dry coca leaves in a way that preserved their cocaine content long delayed the inclusion of cocaine among stimulants valued by Europeans). Coffee and tea, along with sugar, were consumed by the working classes as supplements to their meager diets. I serendipitously came across the Yang article in the fall 2010 issue of The Bulletin of the History of Medicine; I quickly identified it as a useful contribution to the course. Yang combines social construction of what the Chinese called zhang and others call malaria with an ecological discussion of its patterns of prevalence and its role in the efforts of a central Chinese government to gain control of the south. (Today’s New York Times has a heartbreaking article about water shortages in China that reflect continuing tensions between the north and the south. 6/2/11)
WEEK 7 Myron Echenberg. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Historians have described various outbreaks in the plague pandemic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Echenberg provides a more panoramic perspective by examining arrival of the disease, its effects, and human responses to it in 10 cities across several continents.
WEEK 8 Richard Evans. Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1820-1910. Penguin, 2005.
This monumental work remains essential. In this course, it introduced the students to the bacteriological revolution in a more close-grained way than Echenberg (with his different focus) offers. And it did so much more. I commonly ask students to identify how many tools of historical analysis they can identify in the book. The resulting list is a comprehensive catalog of the tools of history of science and medicine, not to mention political and social history. (Okay, a slight exaggeration.) Evans does a masterful job of both setting historical actors in their context for maximum understanding of their motives and actions while also holding them accountable for the effects of their actions.
WEEK 9 Selections from Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla, eds. The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the “New” Tuberculosis. London: Verso, 2003.
I let the students pick which articles they wanted to read from this look at tuberculosis in a wide range of cities in the very recent past. The volume editors are epidemiologists with a strong appreciation of history. Like Death in Hamburg, these articles brought us into impoverished urban neighborhoods, setting up a theme to be picked up in the final two weeks.
WEEK 10 Paul Gootenberg. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
As an economic historian, Gootenberg discusses cocaine from a commodity chain perspective. This framework provides another means of following a drug through a range of social and economic spaces, discussing changes in value and utility in different contexts. Much has been written about the European pharmaceutical industry; Gootenberg gives us a valuable examination of Peruvian attempts to create its own industry through the production of medicinal cocaine. Gootenberg brings us from the nineteenth well into the twentieth century and the era of drug prohibition.
WEEK 11 Warwick Anderson. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
An example of recent histories that see American public health work abroad as a part of the American imperial project, Colonial Pathologies focuses on Americans’ efforts to improve the productivity and docility of the Filipino population through attacks on such diseases as hookworm, leprosy, and malaria.
WEEK 12 Alfred W. McCoy. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Revised and expanded edition of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Brooklyn, Lawrence Hill, 1991.
This expanded version of the 1972 Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia adds chapters on the heroin market involving Turkey and the Middle East and the French Connection. With Andean Cocaine, this book allows a focus on the dynamics of markets in illicit commodities. It especially highlights how the fungibility of drugs promotes their use in conflicts where a weak state confronts guerilla groups.
WEEK 13 Philippe Bourgois. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Bourgois sets his intensive ethnographic study of crack sellers in East Harlem against a century of Puerto Rican history as successive generations were displaced from land, emigrated, entered factory work, and became surplus labor ill suited for the finance-insurance-real estate economy that followed deindustrialization.
WEEK 14 Paul Farmer. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Like Bourgois, Farmer is an anthropologist who displays deep empathy for the marginal population he studies. Though Farmer’s view that AIDS came to Haiti via gay American tourists has since been disproven, his reconstruction of the meanings of AIDS in the village of Do Kay shows us how a barely literate people living among vying cultural and medical explanations of disease interpret their experience. Like Bourgois, Farmer insists on the importance of history to understanding the present, as he sets his ethnographic portrait against Haiti’s long history of marginalization in the context of the Americas.
Each student wrote a five-page essay raising points for discussion on one week’s readings; the student led discussion that week for the first half of the three-hour seminar. One of the students told me that this strategy improved his motivation to do all the readings carefully, the better to support the student in that week’s hot seat. In all other weeks, students wrote two- to three-page essays on the readings. The course was great fun to teach and the students enjoyed it a lot. Here’s the full syllabus for the course:
History 79-752: Drugs and Germs in Global Trade and Empire
Instructor: Caroline Acker, acker@andrew.cmu.edu
Course Description: The course will begin in the period just before the European voyages of exploration and will end in the late twentieth century. It will follow drugs across oceans and borders from when they became important commodities in the emerging global trade of the early modern period. It will also examine social and cultural contexts of and meanings ascribed to drug use by different peoples in different times. In particular, it will examine what happens to patterns of use as a drug moves from one social, cultural, and economic setting to another. Drugs to be followed will include opium, tobacco, chocolate, coffee, and tea in the early modern period as these drugs were used in China, India, Mesoamerica, Europe, and the Middle East. Later readings will focus on heroin and cocaine trafficking and use in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Latin America and the United States.
As people increasingly traveled long distances around the world, bacteria and viruses traveled with them to places where populations were unfamiliar with them. Resulting epidemics sparked panic as well as more orderly attempts to control and prevent epidemic outbreaks. Over time and with new or continued exposure, people and pathogens evolved into new forms of relationship. Some species purposely brought to new lands also altered ecological arrangements. Among the diseases to be analyzed in specific settings, especially port cities in several continents, are cholera, malaria, and bubonic plague.
Both drugs and disease posed challenges that elicited state action. Drugs could be sources of state revenue, or objects of concern based on their effects on behavior, or both; they could also be medicines. Disease could cause social upheaval and sap productivity. States acted vigorously to attempt to structure the market channels in which drugs moved and to control the spread of infectious disease. Moreover, states sometimes responded to drug use and disease outbreak in similar ways. Both drug use and disease elicited state attempts to control subjects’ or citizens’ behavior. The spread of drug use in populations was compared to the spread of disease. The course will examine how attempts to control drug trade and disease incidence influenced not just the actions of states but also the bases for states’ claims to power and authority. This course falls in the Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine cluster.
Assignments: Beginning in week 2 (Aug. 30), students will submit a two to three page double-spaced essay discussing the week’s readings to Blackboard by 10:00 am on the day of class. Each student will submit a four to five double-spaced essay on a week’s readings once during this semester (this essay replaces the shorter one for that week). These longer essays should also be posted by 10:00 am. Students should read all the posted essays before class that afternoon. In weeks when a student has written a 4-5 page essay, that student will lead class discussion for the first half of the class session (2:30 to 3:45).
REQUIRED TEXTS: Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th Anniversary Edition. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003. (First edition was published in 1972.)
Marcy Norton. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Rudi Matthee. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Myron Echenberg. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Richard Evans. Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1820-1910. Penguin, 2005.
Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla, eds. The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the “New” Tuberculosis. London: Verso, 2003.
Paul Gootenberg. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Warwick Anderson. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Alfred W. McCoy. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Revised and expanded edition of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Brooklyn, Lawrence Hill, 1991.
Philippe Bourgois. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Paul Farmer. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
WEEKLY READINGS: Aug: 23:
Charles E. Rosenberg. “Disease and Social Order in America: Perceptions and Expectations.” In Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox., eds. AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 12-32.
Günter B. Risse. “Epidemics and History: Ecological Perspectives.” In Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox., eds. AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 33-66.
Howard Becker. “Becoming a Marihuana User” and “Marijuana and Social Control.” In Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963), 41-78.
Andrew Sherratt. “Introduction: Peculiar Substances.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 1-10.
Jordan Goodman and Paul E. Lovejoy. “Afterword.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 255-60.
All articles available at Blackboard.
Aug. 30: Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th Anniversary Edition. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003. (First edition was published in 1972.)
Recommended readings: Samuel Eliot Morison. The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500-1600. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.)
(No class on Sep. 6, Labor Day.)
Sep. 13: Marcy Norton. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Recommended readings: Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann. Plants of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use. New York: McGraw Hill, 1979.
Sep. 20: Rudi Matthee. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Recommended readings: Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds. Drugs and Narcotics in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Sep 27: Articles on opium in India and China.
Paul Winther. “Introduction” and “The Wider Context: Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire.” In Winther, Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 1-32 and 323-42.
Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. “Introduction: Opium’s History in China.” In Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1-27.
Carl A. Trocki. “Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia.” In Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 79-104.
David Bello. “Opium in Xinjiang and Beyond.” In Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 127-51.
All articles available at Blackboard.
Recommended readings: Carl A. Trocki. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750-1950. New York: Routledge, 1999.
William O. Walker. Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912-1954. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Yangwen Zheng. The Social Life of Opium in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Oct. 4: Articles on drug travels and disease constructions.
Alexander von Gernet. “Nicotian Dreams: The Prehistory and Early History of Tobacco in Eastern North America.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 65-85.
Jordan Goodman. “Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 121-41.
Woodruff D. Smith. “From Coffeehouse to Parlour: The Consumption of Coffee, Tea and Sugar in North-Western Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2007), 142-57.
Bin Yang. “The Zhang on Chinese Southern Frontiers: Disease Constructions, Environmental Changes, and Imperial Colonization.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84(Sep. 2010)2:163-92.
All articles available at Blackboard.
Recommended readings: Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2007.
Luise White. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Oct. 11: Myron Echenberg. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Recommended readings: Günter B. Risse. “The Politics of Fear: Bubonic Plague in San Francisco, California, 1900. In Linda Bryder and Derek A. Dow, eds. New Countries and Old Medicine: Proceedings of an International Conference on the History of Medicine and Health, (Auckland NZ, 1994), 1-18.
Günter B. Risse. “’A Long Pull, A Strong Pull, and All Together’: San Francisco and Bubonic Plague, 19070-1908.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66(1992):260-86.
Both articles available at Blackboard.
Oct. 18: Richard Evans. Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1820-1910. Penguin, 2005.
Recommended readings: Peter Baldwin. Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Oct. 25: Selections from Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla, eds. The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the “New” Tuberculosis. London: Verso, 2003. (To be announced.)
Recommended readings: Rene J. Dubos. The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society. Reprint of 1952 edition with introduction by David Mechanic. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
Randall Packard. White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Nov. 1: Paul Gootenberg. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Recommended readings: Francisco E. Thoumi. Illegal Drugs, Economy, and Society in the Andes. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
William O. Walker. Drug Control in the Americas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
Bruce Michael Bagley and William O. Walker, eds. Drug Trafficking in the Americas. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1994.
Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America. Updated edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Nov. 8: Warwick Anderson. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Recommended readings: Randall Packard. The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Nov. 15: Alfred W. McCoy. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Revised and expanded edition of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Brooklyn, Lawrence Hill, 1991.
Recommended readings: William B. McAllister. Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Nov. 22: Philippe Bourgois. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Recommended readings: Junot Diaz. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Nov. 29: Paul Farmer. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Recommended readings: Maryinez Lyons. The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Caroline Jean Acker Carnegie Mellon University