This account of the 1949 famine in colonial Malawi employs a wide variety of historical sources, ranging from Colonial Office documentation to the songs of women who lived through the tragedy. The analysis of the causes and development of the famine takes the reader through a detailed agricultural and social history of Southern Malwai in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on the nature of social and economic stratification, changes in kinship systems and the position of women and placing all this within the wider context of the impact of colonial rule.

This is a lively and original book, which treats Western biomedical discourse about illness in Africa as a cultural system that constructed -the African- out of widely varying, and sometimes improbable, materials. Referring mainly to British dependencies in East and Central Africa in the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, it draws on diverse sources ranging from court records and medical journals to fund-raising posters and -jungle doctor- cartoons. Curing Their Ills brings refreshing concreteness and dynamism to the discussion of European attitudes toward their others, as...

A historical reconstruction of the making of a slave society in the Indian Ocean.

'Psychiatry and Empire' brings together scholars in the History of Medicine and Colonialism to explore questions of race, gender and power relations in former colonial states across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. The volume advances our understanding of the rise of modern psychiatry as it collided with the psychology of colonial rule.

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between European medicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vaughan's detailed examination of medical discourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa, and explores the conflict between its pretensions to scientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations.

The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European 'Jungle...

What are the problems of rural food supply in southern Africa today and how have they arisen historically? In part this book is a reconstruction of an African agricultural system over one hundred years; in part it is an examination of the construction of knowledge about a rural African people. The first half of the book focuses on the chitemene agricultural system of the Bemba known as slash and burn. The authors show that chitemene involves a great deal more than the cutting and burning of trees. The second half addresses the question of labour migration and its effects on the agricultural...

In this set of essays Walima T. Kalusa and Megan Vaughan explore themes in the history of death in Zambia and Malawi from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Drawing on extensive archival and oral historical research they examine the impact of Christianity on spiritual beliefs, the racialised politics of death on the colonial Copperbelt, the transformation of burial practices, the histories of suicide and of maternal mortality, and the political life of the corpse.

This book brings together scholars in the History of Medicine to explore questions of race, gender and power relations in former colonial states across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific.