Virology

Viruses and colonialism are hand in glove, to posit an unsanitary metaphor. As Jared Diamond writes in Guns, Germs and Steel, his bestselling global history, European colonisation, particularly in the Americas and Australasia, cannot be understood without reference to the terrible, at times genocidal, ravages of disease on indigenous societies. Yet at the same time, and in a bitter irony, anxieties about disease and dirt were used to justify invasion, racial discrimination and paternalist colonial laws. While European germs wiped out indigenous communities, it was colonised subjects who were constructed as the harbingers of disease. The colonial project was imagined not just as a religious, moral and economic mission, but as an exercise in public health.