Author: Rochelle

This week, we welcomed Stefanie Gänger (Universität zu Köln) who took us on a global journey through the history of science and medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Her talk brought to life our theme of ‘space’ and offered a wealth of insights into the circulation of knowledge. If you were not able to come along, you can catch up with the full talk via the Audiomack link below or via our podcast channel. Alternatively, Calum Aikman sends this pithy report. 

Cinchona, also known as Peruvian bark, first became known for its medicinal qualities back in the seventeenth century. Grown by the Jesuits on the eastern slopes of the Spanish-American Andes with the prosaic aim of combating fevers and chills, the drug did not easily conform to existing practices: it was unable to dispel ‘humours’, nor did its bitter, astringent taste endear itself to those willing to consume it.

Few, therefore, could have foreseen how popular it would become; yet, by the turn of the early nineteenth century, the reputation of cinchona was so well established that it was estimated that a total of between 15 and 38 million doses per annum were administered globally. Such was its success in tackling ailments that it was even considered to have divine medical virtues.

The purpose of Stefanie’s paper, however, was not to enumerate the reasons for cinchona’s reputation as an early ‘wonder drug’, nor to examine the nature of its production, but to trace how the knowledge of its restorative properties was subsequently diffused throughout the world. One important factor which aided propagation, she claimed, was the increasing significance of the written word in Western culture. The utility of Peruvian bark was soon recorded in medical dictionaries worldwide, such as those edited by Samuel-Auguste Tissot and William Buchan, and translated into numerous different languages.

In addition, for those laymen practitioners unacquainted with textbooks, there were an array of almanacs and periodicals to guide them: one common resource in Spanish America, for instance, was the volume of remedies compiled by the Jesuit missionary Juan de Esteyneffer, which was favoured by the local Creole populations.

Discourses in how to prepare cinchona were thus gradually woven into the fabric of Western and colonial societies. Many remedy books advised that the bark be infused in an aromatic compound to make it more palatable, usually by mixing it with wine; this was the case with Agua de Inglaterra (‘English water’), which was found throughout Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone communities in West Africa. But recipes varied by region: whereas Chinese physicians imbued the bark with cinnamon, in Morocco it was more likely to be treated with vinegar. Stefanie argued that this exemplified how the understanding of a common resource could quickly be subjected to indigenous tastes and mores.

The changing nature of medical practice also allowed cinchona to gain acceptance in areas far removed from its natural habitat. Although relatively cheap in the Andes, it was expensive to procure in most overseas markets. Nonetheless, this did not stop it from growing in popularity far beyond the upper echelons of consumer society. Literate, middle-class households may have dutifully inscribed in notebooks the many ways in which they used the bark, but paupers and slaves were also given it as a cure. In the latter case, it was often mixed into their healing potions. This was frequently at the behest of state authorities and charities, which would have subsidised the expense.

Finally, Cinchona’s fame was also disseminated by word of mouth, which reassured those who were inclined to place their trust in popular testimony. In the Andean territories of Peru and New Granada, native healers were assiduous in preparing the drug for all manner of treatments, which led to knowledge transfer and regular lines of communication about how it should be used.

Stefanie noted that soldiers and sailors were also influential in this regard; many would have been familiar with Cinchona due to its prevalence in army medical supplies (as troops were regularly exposed to insalubrious climates, they were often given it prophylactically in order to shield them from disease), and their willingness to spread the word further helped ensure its acceptance far and wide.

In her concluding remarks, Stefanie suggested that many existing perceptions of global historical development stress the primacy of locality. Her counter-argument is that, while this is important, knowledge can also transcend such a context. Cinchona is a good example of this: its inherent malleability assured its recognition beyond the Andes, allowing it to spread across the globe and become newly situated in a myriad of contrasting environments where understandings were not identical. The production of scientific knowledge, therefore, is not just bound to one place, but can be interpreted anew in locales far removed from its original circumstances.

In her comment, Sarah Easterby-Smith (St Andrews) attempted to place Stefanie’s paper within the wider context of recent historiographical debates, suggesting that it echoed a 2004 journal article by Jim Secord, which depicted science as the product of knowledge in transit and contingent on local production of information. She was pleased to see several examples of source material on display during the presentation, but felt that Stefanie’s analysis was nonetheless limited in some areas.

Were there, for example, any examples of cinchona failing as a drug, and could there have been problems in its circulation? Arguing that people were both ‘present and absent’ in the paper, she also wondered if it was possible to properly strike a balance between the ‘big picture’ and the efforts of select individuals. Moreover, although claiming that an attribute of Stefanie’s analysis was that it was resistant to the easy narrative of ‘flows’, she determined that there had been little opportunity for surrounding power structures to be properly investigated. Despite these apprehensions, she welcomed the paper as an imaginative step forward in conceptualising how knowledge proceeds to enter different ‘spaces’.

Calum Aikman is a PhD student in History. His research mostly focuses on twentieth-century British and Scottish politics, trade union history and the fortunes of the Labour Party in the post-war era. His thesis is on the political thought of the Labour Party’s ‘revisionist’ right wing in the 1970s. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

In the midst of the current debate about the construction of the wall between the US and Mexico, we invited Ben Smith (Warwick) to discuss the origins of the war on drugs between the US and Mexico in the 1950s. His entertaining talk gave us a welcome additional perspective on this year’s theme of ‘space’. Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz sends this report. 

Ben began by describing the emerging moral panic in the USA over drug use in the 1950s. In California, both politicians and members of civil society developed a distinct set of arguments about how to stop the drug trade. These blamed US drug use on Mexican supply, targeted the problem of Mexican corruption, and suggested manipulation of the border as a means to blackmail the Mexican authorities to crack down on traffickers. By the late 1960s, these arguments had become cornerstones of US, and particularly Republican, counter-narcotics policy. In 1969, President Nixon even implemented the de facto shutting of the border in the form of Operation Intercept.

But California’s moral panic not only formed the basis for Nixon’s war on drugs, it also had serious effects south of the border. Here, a complex interplay of exogenous and endogenous pressures emerged. Californian denouncements of Baja California’s corruption interwove with and strengthened homegrown Mexican hostility to the ruling party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional). Such opposition took the form of a critical public sphere, combative civil society organizations, and, by the late 1950s, a powerful local branch of the opposition Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Such groups, when combined with US pressure, forced local authorities to enact periodic, well-publicized crackdowns on narcotics traffickers, corrupt cops, and addicts.

By analysing the dynamics and effects of California’s 1950 moral panic, Smith’s talk brought together, worked off, and revised two distinct historical traditions. First, the origins of the USA’s war on drugs of which many scholars have pinpointed the 1950s as a decisive point of inflection. During this decade, politicians, bureaucrats, and members of civil society not only established a new, and radically more punitive, judicial framework, but also developed a distinct underlying “narrative” or “cultural script” to describe the drug trade and justify these legal changes. This narrative contained two elements: the African-American or Mexican- American drug pusher and the white, often female, drug user or victim.

In his work, Smith has built on such findings and pushed them further. He argues that a third and crucial element of this narrative was the figure of the Mexican drug trafficker. This narrative underlay a series of suggested approaches to drug use, which also emerged during the 1950s. These stressed the idea that anti-narcotics efforts should squeeze supply south of the border, that Mexican authorities were often unwilling to do this, and that manipulation of border traffic and trade could coerce them into action. Yet these measures were not simply reactions to exogenous US pressure. They were also responses to endogenous demands from members of Mexican civil society to clean up local politics. To put it another way, Mexican drug policy was often determined by subnational politics.

In summing up, Smith pointed to the connections between the domestic and the international aspects of the war on drugs. Rather than seeing them as separate issues (to be studied by separate disciplines), Smith suggested we should instead observe them as deeply intertwined. We should, in short, view the thousands of African Americans languishing in US prisons and the thousands of dead and disappeared Mexicans as two sides of the same coin – victims of the same interlinking processes.

In his comment, Edinburgh’s resident Brazilianist Jake Blanc focused on three main ideas: the range of historical concepts employed by Smith, in particular, the concept of US moralising and how to think about it transnationally. Secondly, the context of the early 1950s and the role that the global Cold War might have played in the origins of the war on drugs by US authorities, a question absent in Smith’s talk. And, finally, the roots of the cooperation across the borders between the USA and Mexico.

The seminar ended with a lively question and answer session, which touched on a diverse range of topics, including current conflicts between the USA and Mexico, the role of the DEA in the War on Drugs, the primary sources that have underpinned Smith’s research, and the role that films and television play in shaping realities, notably Netflix’s Narcos Mexico.

Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz is a PhD student in History. His research interests lie broadly in the history of the European left, political theory, political violence and historical memory. His thesis focuses on the political commitment of Eric Hobsbawm and his passion for politics in a transformed world (since 1977). He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

What can a dispute over a tiny river island in nineteenth century India tell us about our current political crisis? At first glance, not much. But a richly-drawn talk by Akhila Yechury (St Andrews) inspired an eager audience to reflect on how seemingly small events can have major political consequences. Read Ros Parr’s seminar report to find out more – or listen again to the entire talk via the Audiomack link below or directly on the CSMCH podcast channel. 

The focus of Akhila’s paper was sovereignty and, in particular, the interactions between French administrators and their British rivals in India. Analysing these colonial-era debates, she highlighted the interplay of ideas framed by Westphalian-inspired international law with older, more fluid local understandings of sovereignty based on hereditary and administrative claims. Her astute reflections on the hybrid forms of legitimacy this produced reveal much about the concept of sovereignty and its multiple and evolving meanings in the modern world. The British deployment of the concept of divisible sovereignty, in which French jurisdiction co-existed with the perceived right of the dominant imperial power to intervene, was particularly enlightening.

The paper introduced research from Akhila’s forthcoming book on French colonialism in India.  This framework, in which territorially fragmented French claims existed alongside those of the British, provides a unique lens for examining the imperial state. Yet, as befits a reflection on the Centre’s current theme of space, the paper moved up and down the spatial scales ranging from tiny French settlements known as loges to the universalist assumptions of the international system.

One striking feature of Akhila’s study was the detailed analysis of the everyday within these debates.  Local smugglers and colonial administrators appeared alongside each other, their various perspectives meticulously traced in the archival record.  This approach firmly roots ideological debates about sovereignty in the context of time and place to reveal the constant negotiation and renegotiation that occurred over time. An obscure controversy about the use of the British postal service to smuggle cocaine into French territory, for example, illuminated the contrast between different abstract notions and the fluidity of sovereign rights in practice.

Commenting on the paper, Harshan Kumarasingham (Edinburgh) drew out some of the contingencies produced by wider events, such as the rebellion of 1857, and the contrasts between the status of French territories and Princely States.  The richness of the archival research was widely acknowledged from the floor and prompted further discussion on the breadth of insight this reveals. With discussions about sovereignty dominating our public debates, Akhila’s research is timely and we look forward to discovering more on this important topic in her book.

Ros Parr is a Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests are located in transnational and global histories of the twentieth century, particularly through the lenses of South Asian and gender history. Her PhD thesis examined the international activities of Indian nationalist women in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s. She is a CSMCH steering committee member.

We kicked off the new year with a return to ideas of political ‘space’. This came by way of the sometimes unusual fantasies of late 19th century French left-wing authors. Fortunately, we had Alex Paulin-Booth (Université Libre de Bruxelles) on hand to decode the meanings and implications of this utopian and dystopian thinking. Anita Klinger sends this report or you can listen again by following the Audiomack link below or subscribing to our podcast channel (on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts).

Alex’s research is concerned with ideas of time; in particular, she examines experiences and understandings of time and their effect on political activism. In her paper, she focused on the radical French left around 1900 and spoke about how their ideas about time shaped their politics. Notions of time, she argued, became particularly bound up with the questions of the day. As the possibility of a revolution became less certain after the Paris Commune, it provided the left with new, alternative discursive and political spaces to think about possible futures.

Her two main strands of investigation for the paper were, on the one hand, futurist novels and, on the other, the discourse around evolutionary theory, both of which were experiencing a boom around 1900. Through these sources, Alex argued, historians were able to examine how the/a future might have been conceived of by political activists, allowing us to enter into their mind-sets, while also providing us with a history of “how people got things wrong”.

Following an illuminating summary of the limited historiography surrounding the study of time, Alex began by laying out a major concern on the French left around 1900. She spoke of the criticism of Marxism as taking away agency from the proletariat by insisting on “waiting around” for the revolution to come, rather than focusing on concrete, reformist steps which could be taken towards the betterment of society. As concrete discussion of the future was side-lined in political activism, Alex argued that it was displaced into the realm of literature. By way of example, she talked about four turn-of-the-century French novels in some more detail. They were Maurice Spronck’s L’an 330 de la République (1894); Eugène Fournière’s Chez nos petits fils (1900); Daniel Halévy’s Histoire des quatre ans (1903); and Anatole France’s Sur la pierre blanche (1905). Though all four quite different, Alex identified a few themes which these utopian and/or dystopian stories had in common.

One prominent theme was technological development and the anxiety which the new pace of change induced in contemporaries. Though this anxiety had been mounting since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Alex argued that especially evolutionary theory and science had placed all of humanity on a new and vast plane of time, heightening this anxiety even further. Another theme which some of the authors were particularly ambiguous about was the future of work, and the prospect of worklessness. While technological advances would likely reduce working hours, there were serious concerns about not losing control of time altogether and needing to balance the new spare time with some structure to prevent, as Halévy envisioned it, a society plagued by drug use and alcoholism, now that work was not central to the structure of society any more.

A third theme was that of the unity of European nations under some form of federalist structure. This unity, in Maurice Spronck’s imagining, had made redundant the need for any European armies and thus exposed the continent to great threats, particularly from ‘the East’ and North Africa. The utopia, therefore, revealed itself as more of a dystopia after all, at least to Spronck, who, notably, was the only one of the four authors who was on the political right, rather than on the left.

Curiously, Alex noted, these novels all imagined a future, but once the future was arrived at – often through the heavy-handed literary device of having the protagonist transported there in his sleep – the imagined future proved static. The authors rarely explained how the future societies they had imagined had actually been brought about, presenting a future that was ‘cut off’ from the present with no plan of how to get there.

Towards the end of her paper, Alex went on to speak more about the ‘cult’, or ‘religion’ of science which became increasingly popular around 1900. Science promised progress, based on actual evidence, and evolutionary theory in particular was one such way of progressing. It allowed people to conceive of mankind as a living organism which followed the newly-popularised (and immediately bastardised) theory of evolution. In this way, a scenario in which people would fall out of step with the accelerated pace of change could hopefully be avoided entirely.

However, as Alex emphasised, while these (ab)uses of science may have served as a useful ‘shorthand’, they were more often than not lacking a deep understanding of the actual science behind them. Alex concluded that, overall, the French left around 1900 tried to use science, and especially ideas of time, to safeguard their revolutionary goals while also defending itself against the accusation of uselessly dreaming rather than engaging in meaningful reformist change in the present.

In his comment, Emile Chabal (Edinburgh) reminded the audience that thinking about time was central to the way we understand politics, and therefore a very appealing subject. By including one author from the political right, Emile posited, Alex had made us think especially about what was interesting or perhaps unique about the left at this point in time. In his view, the left was in a state of failure, and therefore in particular need of utopias, where – even though the process was left unclear – the endpoint at least was not.

Emile also raised the point of work and labour. How far had the four novels Alex presented posed the question of the future of work and how should the left position itself as technology may be making work, and workers, ever less central to societies and identities? He furthermore suggested that a political compass might be imagined which did not span from left to right, but from the past (traditionally the focus of more conservative politics), via the present (with which liberalism was most concerned) to the future (which was the remit of the revolutionary left, and right). Lastly, Emile wondered what it might mean for our conceptualisations of time and politics that the current generation in the Western world did not necessarily envision a better future for themselves, while vast populations for example in Asia were still full of utopian dreams and aspirations.

The seminar ended with a lively question and answer session, which touched on a diverse range of topics, including the significance of the French empire; the role of the revolutionary right; notions of constant crises on the left; the place of gender in the utopias imagined by the four authors; and the effects of the Russian Revolution and the First World War on ideas of time.

Anita Klingler is a PhD student in History. Her research interests lie broadly in twentieth century European history, political and colonial violence, and coming to terms with a violent past. Her thesis compares attitudes towards political violence in interwar Britain and Germany. She is a CSMCH steering committee member.

As Edinburgh served up some of its least hospitable November weather, the Centre warmly welcomed Michael Goebel (Graduate Institute, Geneva), to discuss his most recent project on urban ethnic segregation in the global south in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rosalind Parr was there to bring us this report, or you can listen again to the talk by following the Audiomack link below or on the CSMCH podcast channel.

For several years, Michael has been at the forefront of global history.  His influential Anti-Imperial Metropolis (2015) examined migrant communities in interwar Paris, shining a spotlight on the formative experiences of Ho Chi Minh and Deng Xiaoping, amonst others.  Speaking to the Centre’s current theme of ‘space,’ his current work reflects a deepening interest in the emerging sub-field of global urban history and seeks to bring historians and social scientists into dialogue on the question of ethnic segregation in global cities.

Michael’s paper presented preliminary research on an ambitious new project, whch takes as its starting point the assumption, found in the work of Saskia Sasson and others, that globalization exacerbates urban socio-spatial polarization.  By examining ethnic segregation in multiple port cities in the global south, he argues, historians can unpack this widely held assumption and offer stimulating new insights to the debate.

Given Michael’s background in global history, it is not surprising that his research offers a consciously ‘decentred’ perspective.  At issue is the dominance of the North American urban spatial model, based as it is on exceptional conditions of racial segregation, which has unduly influenced the global picture.

As Michael noted, in light of recent studies of urban cosmopolitanism in the global south, the assumed link between globalisation and ethnic segregation looks much less stable. One very important objective of Michael’s work is to bring observations found in rich, area-specific studies such as Su Lin Lewis’s Cities in Motion, into dialogue with a truly global, cross-disciplinary literature on the topic.

Drawing on an impressive variety of sources, Michael offered as case studies Havana, Manila, and Buenos Aires.  Even after what he presented as preliminary findings, it was clear that levels of segregation manifested unevenly in different geographical contexts. Cosmopolitan Manila, for example, became increasing heterogeneous even as micro-segregation existed at the level of church seating arrangements. In Havana, the prevalence of racially structured domestic slavery hampered ethnic segregation due to the co-habitation of master and slave.

Yet Michael’s argument goes beyond the observation of local complexity and regional variation; his analysis is alert to the importance of timing and changes over time. The relatively early arrival of Italian migrants in Buenos Aires produced ethnic segregation based on their ability (in contrast to later-arriving Spanish migrants) to take advantage of lower land values in semi-urban areas.  These findings point to striking historical contingency, as well as complexity and variation, in the development of urban ethnic segregation in a globalizing world.

In his comment, Edinburgh’s pre-eminent urban historian, Richard Rodger, drew attention to the important question of generational shifts in ethnic identities, amongst other responses. His remarks, along with comments and questions from the floor, suggest that Michael’s objective of instigating scholarly conversations around the big questions of globalization and urbanization will no doubt be achieved.  We look forward to hearing more as the project develops.

Rosalind Parr is a temporary Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of St Andrews. She is a CSMCH steering committee member.