“The flying ability of the mosquito made the situation difficult to cope with”: Contamination, Containment, and the Biopolitics of the Madeira‐ Mamoré Railway

Abstract

This article examines the role that disease-carrying mosquitoes played in the biopolitics of organisation during the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway. Going beyond an emphasis on how life is managed by human government, it investigates how the politics of capitalist expansion is entangled in human and non-human living bodies. I argue that in the imperial context of early twentieth-century infrastructural developments in the Amazonian region, many carried out by foreign companies, measures for disease control cannot be separated from cultural and political stories – racialised stories – of multi-species contact and contamination, and their impact on processes of globalisation. Via the Brazil Railway Company’s photographic records, medical and engineering reports, and workers’ memoirs and articles, as well as Brazilian medical reports, newspapers, and literature, I approach contagion as a valuable concept for reflecting on coexistence in precarious environments marked by global interactions and colonial histories.