During the nineteenth century, European scientists and physicians considered the tropics the natural home of pathogens. Hot and miasmic, the tropical world was the locus of disease, for Euopeans the great enemy of civilization. In the late nineteenth century when bacteriological laboratories and institutions were introduced to British India, they were therefore as much an imperial mission to cleanse and civilize a tropical colony as a medical one to eradicate disease. Bacteriology offered a panacea in colonial India, a way by which the multifarious political, social, environmental, and medical problems and anxieties, intrinsically linked to its diseases, could have a single resolution. Bacteriology in British India is the first book to provide a social and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating it within the confluence of advances in germ theory, Pastuerian vaccines, colonial medicine, laboratory science, and British imperialism. It recounts the genesis of bacteriology and laboratory medicine in India through a complex history of conflict and alignment between Pasteurism and British imperial medicine. By investigating an array of laboratory notes, medical literature, and literary sources, the volume links colonial medical research with issues of poverty, race, nationalism, and imperial attitudes toward tropical climate and wildlife, contributing to a wide field of scholarship like the history of science and medicine, sociology of science, and cultural history. Pratik Chakrabarti is Chair in History of Science and Medicine, University of Manchester.

'Original and illuminating ... what a good book this is' Jonathan Dimbleby 'A love letter to the people of the Old City' Jerusalem Post In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. Maps divide the walled Old City into four quarters, yet that division doesn't reflect the reality of mixed and diverse neighbourhoods. Beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, much of the Old City remains little known to visitors, its people overlooked and their stories untold. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem lets the communities of the Old City speak for themselves. Ranging through ancient past and political present, it evokes the city's depth and cultural diversity. Matthew Teller's highly original 'biography' features the Old City's Palestinian and Jewish communities, but also spotlights its Indian and African populations, its Greek and Armenian and Syriac cultures, its downtrodden Dom Gypsy families and its Sufi mystics. It discusses the sources of Jerusalem's holiness and the ideas - often startlingly secular - that have shaped lives within its walls. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem is an evocation of place through story, led by the voices of Jerusalemites.