KULeuven Lecture Series: Anthrax Management at the Cattle Frontier: Local Knowledge, Imperial Technopolitics and Transimperial Exchanges in Colonial Madagascar by Samuël Coghe

Anthrax Management at the Cattle Frontier: Local Knowledge, Imperial Technopolitics and Transimperial Exchanges in Colonial Madagascar
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Madagascar became an important exporter of live cattle and cattle commodities such as hides and beef. While this process started before French colonial conquest in 1895, the cattle frontier was fuelled and profoundly reshaped by French colonization. Yet cattle diseases constituted an important challenge to the colonial-capitalist transformation of Madagascar’s cattle economies. This paper focuses on the colonial management of anthrax, a bacterial disease with a particular disease ecology that not only killed cattle, but also humans in both Madagascar and hide-importing countries. It argues that colonial policies against anthrax became less ecological in scope but increasingly geared towards preventive mass vaccination campaigns as a form of “imperial technopolitics” (Velmet 2020). This response was favoured by French Pastorians, but also shaped by Malagasy veterinary assistants and pastoralists as well as the transimperial circlation of experts and vaccines. Transimperial exchanges, however, were not unbounded. The partly overlapping yet also diverging developments in South Africa show how inter-imperial rivalries and scientific nationalism led to distinct forms of anthrax management in colonial Madagascar.

Samuël Coghe
Samuël Coghe is Associate Professor of African and Global History at Ghent University. He studied history in Berlin and Lisbon, obtained his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence and held various positions at universities and research institutes in Berlin and Gießen. His work deals with the history of Portuguese, French and Belgian colonialism in Africa, with particular attention for the history of medicine and for transimperial and global perspectives. He is the author of Population Politics in the Tropics. Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (CUP, 2022) and currently (2023-28) leads the ERC project (Post)Colonial Cattle Frontiers. Capitalism, Science and Empire in Southern and Central Africa, 1890s-1970s.

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