Tropicality as international governance: Bridging colonial, post-imperial and socialist histories
Examination of how ‘tropicality’ has shaped the international history of health since the 19th century.
This presentation examines how the notion of ‘tropicality’ has shaped the international history of health since the 19th century. Its target audience are students and staff interested in colonial and post-imperial histories of global health, race, and disease.
Since the 19th century, state, imperial, post-colonial, and international actors, politics, and health priorities converged upon the epidemic management of populations situated along hierarchies of modernity and civilisation. The talk explores the notion of “tropicality” as a guiding concept for understanding the international history of health. “Tropicality” deemed entire populations as "Others": human groups culturally and epidemiologically alien to whites, or more generally to "civilised" majorities, who lived in territories environmentally distinctive from Europe or peripheral to national cores. "Tropicality" referred to any epidemic peril threatening the welfare and development of racialised populations managed by empires. I show that such imperial vantage point had a formative impact on the medical programs developed by international organisations as well as by post-imperial and decolonising elites.
The trans-regional transposition of "tropicality" underlines multipolar scientific mobilities, amalgamated development policies and stubborn continuities within international organisations. It highlights the fluidity of racial hierarchies within and beyond states or various areas of the world. The presentation analyses how disease and populations were tropicalised across empires, nation-states, and international organisations. Its findings reveal the intractable entanglement between health care and race during the global engineering of modernity well into the 21st century.
Speaker
Bogdan C. Iacob
Bogdan C. Iacob is a researcher at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History (Romanian Academy). His work centres on state socialist medicine in global contexts. He has published on eastern European malariology during the 20th century, on medical teams from the socialist camp dispatched to Southeast Asia and Africa or on primary healthcare and the late Cold War. His most recent publication is entitled "Overcoming Whiteness? Romanian Humanitarianism in Sub-Saharan Africa During the 1960s", Journal of Contemporary History (November 2025, open access). He is co-editor of Off White. Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race (Manchester UP, 2024, open access).
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