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In the 1890s, the Pasteur Institute established a network of
laboratories that stretched across France's empire, from Indochina
to West Africa. Quickly, researchers at these laboratories became
central to France's colonial project, helping officials monopolize
industries, develop public health codes, establish disease
containment measures, and arbitrate political conflicts around
questions of labor rights, public works, and free association.
Pasteur's Empire shows how the scientific prestige of the Pasteur
Institute came to depend on its colonial laboratories, and how,
conversely, the institutes themselves became central to colonial
politics. This book argues that decisions as small as the isolation
of a particular yeast or the choice of a laboratory animal could
have tremendous consequences on the lives of Vietnamese and African
subjects, who became the consumers of new vaccines or industrially
fermented intoxicants. Simultaneously, global forces, such as the
rise of international standards and American competitors pushed
Pastorians to their imperial laboratories, where they could conduct
studies that researchers in France considered too difficult or
controversial. Chapters follow not just Alexandre Yersin's studies
of the plague, Charles Nicolle's public health work in Tunisia, and
Jean Laigret's work on yellow fever in Dakar, but also the
activities of Vietnamese doctors, African students and politicians,
Syrian traders, and Chinese warlords. It argues that a specifically
Pastorian understanding of microbiology shaped French colonial
politics across the world, allowing French officials to promise
hygienic modernity while actually committing to little development.
In bringing together global history, imperial history, and science
and technology studies, Pasteur's Empire deftly integrates micro
and macro analyses into one connected narrative that sheds critical
light on a key era in the history of medicine.
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