Decolonizing International Health India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Asia was at the heart of international efforts to create a new utopia: a world free from disease. Positioned at the unexplored boundary between international history and the history of colonial/postcolonial medicine, the book is a political, intellectual, and social history of public health in Asia, from the 1930s to the early 1960s. The discussion takes India as its core focus, but highlights the international networks connecting developments in India with the Asian region and the wider world, from Rangoon to New York. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, the book contributes to debates on nationalism, internationalism and the post-colonial State.

SUNIL AMRITH is a research fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Prologue: A New Utopia * Introduction: Decolonizing Health * 'Under a Coconut Shell': The Culture of Rural Hygiene * War and the Rise of Disease Control * Health and Development in the 'New Asia' * Technical Assistance and the Medical Imagination * Public Health, with and without the Body * Ungovernable Spaces: Nature Returns * Conclusion: Enduring Utopias Prologue: A New Utopia * Introduction: Decolonizing Health * 'Under a Coconut Shell': The Culture of Rural Hygiene * War and the Rise of Disease Control * Health and Development in the 'New Asia' * Technical Assistance and the Medical Imagination * Public Health, with and without the Body * Ungovernable Spaces: Nature Returns * Conclusion: Enduring Utopias