This book explores the pressing issues of border control and infectious disease from the nineteenth to present day. The book places world health in world history, microbes and their management in globalization, and disease in the history of international relations, bringing together leading scholars on the history and politics of global health.

In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture. Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity. The essays are written from within the fields of cultural studies, biomedical history and critical sociology. The contributors examine the geographies, policies...

The techniques, rationales, targets and sites of exclusionary practices proliferated over the 19th and 20th centuries, from the transportation of convicts to the moral therapy of the insane. Over this period state agencies and expert authorities refined their efforts to classify and coercively segregate people deemed to be undesirable or dangerous. Populations and individuals categorised as the mad, the infectious, the deviant or the unfit were confined to specific isolated places and were subjected to treatments that spanned correction, care and control. This book examines the coercive and...

This is a cultural history of borders, hygiene and race. It is about foreign bodies, from Victorian Vaccines to the pathologized interwar immigrant, from smallpox quarantine to the leper colony, from sexual hygiene to national hygiene to imperial hygiene. Taking British colonialism and White Australia as case studies, the book examines public health as spatialized biopolitical governance between 1850 and 1950. Colonial management of race dovetailed with public health into new boundaries of rule, into racialized cordons sanitaires.

Concern about the size of the world's population did not begin with the "population bomb" in 1968. It arose in the aftermath of World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. The world population problem concerned the fertility of soil as much as the fertility of women, always involving both "earth" and "life."

Global Population traces the idea of a world population problem as it evolved from the 1920s through the 1960s. The growth and distribution of the human population over the planet's surface came...