The Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. This interdisciplinary work presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era. The essays explore theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. This book will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.

This interdisciplinary work, the first of two volumes, presents essays on various aspects of disease, medicine, and healing in different locations in and around the Indian Ocean from the ninth century to the early modern period. Themes include theoretical explanations for disease, concepts of fertility, material culture, healing in relation to diplomacy and colonialism, public health, and the health of slaves and migrant workers. Overall, the books argue that, throughout the period of study, the Indian Ocean has been the site of multiple interconnected medical interactions that may be viewed in the context of the environmental factors connecting the region. The two volumes are the first to use the Indian Ocean World as a geographical and conceptual framework for the study of disease. It will appeal to academics and graduate students working in the fields of medical and scientific history, as well as in the growing fields of Indian Ocean studies and global history.

Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World presents a new interpretation of the development of the English East India Company between 1660 and 1720. The book explores the connections between scholarship, patronage, diplomacy, trade, and colonial settlement in the early modern world. Links of patronage between cosmopolitan writers and collectors and scholars associated with the Royal Society of London and the universities are investigated. Winterbottom shows how innovative works of scholarship - covering natural history, ethnography, theology, linguistics, medicine, and agriculture - were created amid multi-directional struggles for supremacy in Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The role of non-elite actors including slaves in transferring knowledge and skills between settlements is explored in detail.

Elizabeth Gwillim (1763–1807) and her sister Mary Symonds (1772–1854) produced over two hundred watercolours depicting birds, fish, flowers, people, and landscapes around Madras (now Chennai). The sisters’ detailed letters fill four large volumes in the British Library; their artwork is in the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection of McGill University Library in Canada and in the South Asia Collection in Britain. The first book about their work and lives, Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire asks what these materials reveal about nature, society, and environment in early nineteenth-century South India. Gwillim and Symonds left for India in 1801, following the appointment of Elizabeth’s husband, Henry Gwillim, to the Supreme Court of Madras. Their paintings document, on one hand, the rapidly expanding colonial city of Madras and its population and, on the other, the natural environment and wildlife of the city. Gwillim’s paintings of birds are remarkable for their detail, naturalism, and accuracy. In their studies of natural history, Gwillim and Symonds relied on the expertise of Indian bird-catchers, fishermen, physicians, artists, and translators, contributing to a unique intersection of European and Asian natural knowledge. The sisters’ extensive correspondence demonstrates how women shaped networks of trade and scholarship through exchanges of plants, books, textiles, and foods. In Women, Environment, and Networks of Empire an interdisciplinary group of scholars use the paintings and writings of Elizabeth Gwillim and Mary Symonds to explore natural history, the changing environment, colonialism, and women’s lives at the turn of the nineteenth century.