jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pThis essay presents a survey of recent work in the history of international and global health from the mid‐nineteenth to the early twenty‐first centuries. It considers longstanding narratives alongside recent studies that have deployed approaches consonant with scholarship in the emerging global history of science and medicine. The cumulative impact of this work is to show how the history of international health has long been embedded in colonial landscapes of power, even as it also fostered revolutionary nationalism and grew from anti‐colonial socialist internationalism; and how the absence, as well as presence, of intervention has shaped understandings of global health in recent decades.</jats:p>