The Limits of Linearity: Recasting Histories of Epidemics in the Global South

Abstract

Writing about the history and politics of epidemics and pandemics requires stepping into a historiography that is expansive, transnational, and slotted into specific historical periods. This essay considers the main debates in this expansive historiography and highlights the strengths and limitations of dominant historiographical approaches to the study of epidemics and pandemics. This essay also interrogates the framing of three thematic periods, or categories, commonly identified by historians and social scientists in analyses of epidemics and pandemics: categories of “colonial health,” “international health,” and “global health.” As this essay underscores, scholarship often analyzes epidemics and pandemics through overlapping and complex historical temporalities involving colonization, decolonization, and globalization. However, this approach is often constrained by the limitations of existing archives and the overwhelming focus of published scholarship on dominant institutions, scientific and political figures, and specific disease outbreaks that are commonly associated with categories of “colonial health,” “international health,” and “global health” from the late nineteenth to the present. As a result, scholarship may include linear narratives that flatten or generalize the legacies of epidemics and pandemics. The links between pathogens and pathologies are not linear, however, and colonial structures of power, disease tropes, and surveillance doctrines often persist across time and space. This essay ultimately seeks to challenge and complicate these dominant framings and categories from within. This approach highlights the connectedness—and complex continuities and discontinuities—in the political, economic, social, and scientific perceptions of and approaches to epidemic and pandemic risks.