Abstract
The historical literature on insecticides and tropical disease is focussed overwhelmingly on the global Malaria Eradication Programme launched by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1955. The dominance at the WHO of the view that an aggressive programme of eradication using insecticides was the only acceptable option in the fight against malaria has led to the notion of the post-war hegemony of DDT.1 What this hegemony meant in practice, according to historians such as Randall Packard, was a significant decline in scientific research after 1940.2 It is repeatedly asserted that the dominance of insecticide-based control programmes retarded the understanding of malaria both as a biological and public health event. Packard states ‘The adoption of a global malaria eradication programme by the WHO eradicated malariologists’.3 A dis-tinction has been set up in the literature between research capable of producing nuanced understandings of tropical disease and the crude application of the technological quick fix in the form of DDT. The recurring theme in the narrative of DDT use by rich nations is technological hubris. Post-war interventions in the tropics are said to have been characterised by uncritical faith in the superior nature of Western technology and its transformative power, which is said in the case of DDT to have had its origins in the experiences of the Second World War.4
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
R. Packard (2007). The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press)
J. L. A. Webb (2009). Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
M. J. Dobson, M. Malowany and R. M. Snow (2000). ‘Malaria control in East Africa: the Kampala conference and the Pare-Taveta scheme: a meeting of common and high ground’, Parassitologia, 42, pp. 149–66
L. Schumaker (2000). ‘Malaria’, in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds). Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic), pp. 703–17.
D. J. Bradley (1998). ‘Specificity and verticality in the history of malaria control’, Parassitologia, 40, 9
J. McGregor and T. Ranger (2000). ‘Displacement and disease: epidemics and ideas about malaria and Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, 1945–1996’, Past and Present, 167, pp. 203–37.
S. Clarke (2007). ‘A technocratic imperial state? The colonial office and scientific research, 1940–1960’, Twentieth-Century British History, 18, pp. 453–80.
C. Bonneuil (2000). ‘Development as experiment: state and state building in late Colonial and postcolonial Africa, 1930–1970’, Osiris, 15, pp. 258–81
J. McCracken (1982). ‘Experts and expertise in colonial Malawi’, African Affairs, 81, pp. 101–16.
J. Hodge (2007). Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press).
I. M. Heilbron (1945). ‘The new insecticidal material, DDT’, Journal of the Society of the Arts, xciii, pp. 66–7.
M. Harrison (2007). Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 270.
J. Sheail (1985). Pesticides and Nature Conservation: the British Experience 1950–1970 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 93.
W. J. Reader (1975). Imperial Chemical Industries: A History, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 454–7.
C. Jeffries (1964). A Review of Colonial Research, 1940–1960 (London: HMSO), p. 91.
D. L. Hodgson (2000). ‘Taking stock: state control, ethnic identity and pastoralist development in Tanganyika, 1948–1958’, Journal of African History, 41, pp. 55–78
K. Brown (2005). ‘Tropical medicine and animal diseases: Onderstepoort and the development of veterinary science in South Africa, 1908–1950’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31, pp. 513–29.
M.A.C. Dowling (1953). ‘Control of malaria in Mauritius’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 47, pp. 177–98.
M. Gillies (2000). Mayfly on the Stream of Time (Hamsey: Messuage Books), p. 171.
Colonial Pesticides Research Unit (1960). Report on the Pare-Taveta Malaria Scheme 1954–1959 (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer).
D. Hodgson and M. Van Beusekom (2000). ‘Lessons learned? Development experiences in the late colonial period’, Journal of African History, 41, pp. 29–33.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Sabine Clarke
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clarke, S. (2012). Rethinking the Post-War Hegemony of DDT: Insecticides Research and the British Colonial Empire. In: Berridge, V., Gorsky, M. (eds) Environment, Health and History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347557_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347557_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31322-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-34755-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)