This volume views the study of disease as essential to understanding the key historical developments underpinning the foundation of contemporary Indian Ocean World (IOW) societies. The interplay between disease and climatic conditions, natural and manmade crises and disasters, human migration and trade in the IOW reveals a wide range of perceptions about disease etiologies and epidemiologies, and debates over the origin, dispersion and impact of disease form a central focus in these essays. Incorporating a wide scope of academic and scientific angles including history, social and medical anthropology, archaeology, epidemiology and paleopathology, this collection focuses on diseases that spread across time, space and cultures. It scrutinizes disease as an object, and engages with the subjectivities of afflicted inhabitants of, and travellers to, the IOW.

This volume views the study of disease as essential to understanding the key historical developments underpinning the foundation of contemporary Indian Ocean World (IOW) societies. The interplay between disease and climatic conditions, natural and manmade crises and disasters, human migration and trade in the IOW reveals a wide range of perceptions about disease etiologies and epidemiologies, and debates over the origin, dispersion and impact of disease form a central focus in these essays. Incorporating a wide scope of academic and scientific angles including history, social and medical anthropology, archaeology, epidemiology and paleopathology, this collection focuses on diseases that spread across time, space and cultures. It scrutinizes disease as an object, and engages with the subjectivities of afflicted inhabitants of, and travellers to, the IOW.

Introducing materiality into the study of the history of medicine, this volume hones in on communities across the Indian Ocean World and explores how they understood and engaged with health and medical commodities. Opening up spatial dimensions and challenging existing approaches to knowledge, power and the market, it defines 'therapeutic commodity' and explores how different materials were understood and engaged with in various settings and for a number of purposes. Offering new spatial realms within which the circulation of commodities created new regimes of meaning, Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World demonstrates how medicinal substances have had immediate and far-reaching economic and political consequences in various capacities. From midwifery and umbilical cords, to the social spaces of soap, perfumes in early modern India and remedies for leprosy, this volume considers a vast range of material culture in medicinal settings to better understand the history of medicine and its role in global connections since the early 17th century.

This book explores histories of droughts and floods in the Indian Ocean World, and their connections to broader global climatic anomalies. It deploys an interdisciplinary approach rooted in the emerging field of climate history to investigate the multifaceted effects of global climatic anomalies on regions affected by the Indian Ocean Monsoon System – regularly conceived of as the macro-region’s ‘deep structure.’ Case studies explore how droughts and floods related to anomalous climatic conditions have historically affected states, societies, and ecologies across the Indian Ocean World, including in relation to food security, epidemic diseases, political (in)stability, economic change, infrastructural development, colonialism, capitalism, and scientific knowledge. Tracing longue durée patterns from the twelfth to the early twentieth centuries, this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of global climatic events and their effects on the Indian Ocean World. It highlights essential historical case studies for contextualizing the potential effects of global warming on the macro-region in the present and future.

The essays in this volume examine the nature and extent of disease on indigenous communities and local populations located within the vast regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a result of colonial sea power and colonial conquest. While this established a long-term impact of disease on populations, the essays also offer insights into the dynamics of these populations in resisting colonial intrusions and introduction of disease to newly-acquired territories.

A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi as well as those who want to incorporate Indian Ocean histories into their world history courses. Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow offer course design principles that will help students navigate topics ranging from empire, geography, slavery, and trade to mobility, disease, and the environment. In addition to exploring non-European sources and diverse historical methodologies, they discuss classroom pedagogy and provide curriculum possibilities that will help instructors at any level enrich and deepen standard approaches to world history. Alpers and McDow draw readers into strategically designing courses that will challenge students to think critically about a vast area with which many of them are almost entirely unfamiliar.

This book is about a ‘Small Island’, namely Mauritius in the southwestern Indian Ocean. It is also about a ‘Large Ocean’, the Indian Ocean world—its peoples, histories and cultures. It casts light on the life of an island through what is known not only about the island itself, but also through what is known about the wider Indian Ocean world. It is also about the Indian Ocean world in that it focuses on an island, which, in many senses and dimensions, is not only a model of, but in some respects also a model for wider developments and features of relevance to the Indian Ocean world as a whole.