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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
Alan Bewell. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. 373- $23.95 paper.
Immanuel Kant had such confidence that the pacifying "spirit of commerce" would eventually overcome the nationalist and colonialist wars of Europe that he considered world travel--international "social intercourse"--a universal, cosmopolitan right. In the third article defining "Perpetual Peace," he declared that "all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their communal possession of the earth's surface." A vehement critic of colonialism, Kant proceeded in this article to a bitter attack on those nations that confuse "visiting foreign countries and peoples" with "conquering them," but in defending "the tight of strangers" to pass benignly across "the earth's surface," he neglected to consider the diseases that traveled with them, altering peoples and environments in their devastating path? As Alan Bewell demonstrates in his remarkable book, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, the development of a "universal community" heralded by Kant, a development we now recognize with the term "globalization," in fact described "an earth unified by the continual movement of people, goods, and pathogens" (296). The colonial world market was also the "common market of bacilli" (quoted by Bewell from historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 4), with its "world-making and world-shattering traffic in pathogens" (9).
We know this world well. Bewell wrote his genealogy of globalized medical anxiety during the 1990s, under the relentless contemporary relevance of AIDS; I read it late in the spring of 2003, under the weaker influence of SARS, which has already receded from public attention; by the time this review sees print we will have our next scare and a new acronym. "Microbes are unpredictable," writes Bewell, acknowledging the prescience of Mary Shelley's plague novel, The Last Man: "each year seems to usher in a new health threat and one can hardly be confident in the power of medicine and social institutions to meet these challenges" (309). The "new global expansion and exchange of diseases" (Bewell's definition of "colonial disease," xv) had its impact already in the eighteenth century, but full recognition came with the 1817 outbreak of cholera in the Ganges Delta. The pandemic traveled Europe for more than a decade and eventually reached County Durham in 1831, having stirred anxiety in the English press long beforehand. "Spread along the main transportation and commercial arteries of the nineteenth century--by river, sea, road, and later by railway--cholera mapped the many lines of communication between Britain and its colonial possessions. Its spread thus demarcated the reach of empire, demonstrating that there were no longer any boundaries" (244). When the narrator of The Last Man, Lionel Verney, writes...
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