Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes how the Pastorians developed a new form of colonial governance that was predicated on low-cost technical interventions that were easily standardizable. It highlights both the integrative and divisive functions of the Pastorians’ ideas of universal application. In some cases, the Pastorians’ model helped transport public health solutions across great distances, in other cases it created competitive advantages against other research laboratories. The conclusion then suggests some implications for the history of global health and developments in the post-1945 era.

Africa in the Global Race for a Yellow Fever Vaccine

The Pastorian yellow fever vaccine project interacted with British and American ventures, moving from Dakar to Paris, New York, and Tunis and back to Dakar. The French vaccine developed in this project caused dangerous meningoencephalitis in some children and was used to vaccinate more than fourteen million people in the 1940s. This chapter argues that both global networks of laboratory infrastructure and infrastructural absence in West Africa enabled the Pastorians to develop a viable prototype and ignore its adverse consequences. The technopolitics of vaccine testing and the global politics of laboratory networks interacted here to produce experimental success and practical disaster. The chapter concludes with an investigation of the mass campaigns of the late 1930s and early 1940s, deadly incidents of the 1950s, and the vaccine’s discontinuation in the 1960s and 1970s. It highlights the occasional competition and occasional rivalry with the Rockefeller Foundation and the British Empire.

Pastorization and Its Discontents

Pastorization provided a rationale for monopolizing alcohol and opium industries in French Indochina. Albert Calmette’s “Amyloprocess,” a method of industrial fermentation, became the justification for handing rice wine production to a French company, on the grounds that it produced more hygienic and pure wine than local Vietnamese distillers. Unexpected consequences of the technological process, however, led to widespread revolt. Officials attempted a similar technopolitical strategy with opium manufacturing, but they did not succeed. By comparing alcohol and opium monopolies, this chapter highlights the technical and geopolitical factors that determined the success or failure of these policies. In particular, the Shanghai and Hague drug conferences shaped the range of policy options in the opium industry.

The Invention of Pastorization

This chapter charts the expansion of the Pasteur Institute into French Indochina and the emergence of a distinctively Pastorian microbiology during the years of the third great plague pandemic. It follows Alexandre Yersin’s expeditions to Hong Kong and India, his own encounter with the plague in Nha Trang, and his work in developing containment measures for the Indochinese Government-General. The chapter looks at how Pastorian containment methods were integrated into a systematic program at International Sanitary Conferences by experts such as Albert Calmette and Émile Roux. It concludes by looking at how these programs failed to work in practice but nevertheless reinforced French claims of hygienic modernity.

The Racial Politics of Microbes in Colonial Dakar

This chapter analyzes how the 1928 yellow fever epidemic caused a major political upset in colonial Dakar, reoriented West African public health policies, and empowered the Pasteur Institute in the region. With the plague outbreaks of 1914, public health responses became politically controversial, as they became used by African leaders such as Blaise Diagne. The disease ecology of yellow fever, however, which affected primarily Europeans rather than natives of West Africa, empowered Diagne to call out racist French policies and threatened the stability of French rule. The Pasteur Institute’s proposal to develop a vaccine was widely seen as an opportunity to calm the political situation.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the contributions of the book to French history, the history of bacteriology, and the history of global health. It develops the use of “technopolitics,” particularly the use of the technopolitical strategy known as “pastorization,” and “politics of scale” for the argument advanced later in the book. It establishes the geographical and chronological boundaries of the inquiry (1890–1940) and surveys the history of laboratory medicine in France, particularly the role of Louis Pasteur. Finally, after noting that each chapter follows a particular scientific and political project, from its initial articulation through development, contestation, and praxis, it describes the focus of the individual chapters.

BCG and Technopolitics from Europe to Empire

This chapter describes how the BCG vaccine became a technopolitical weapon in an empire divided between social hygienist and Pastorian interventionist approaches to public health. Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin’s vaccine came under attack in Europe, particularly after a batch of contaminated vaccines killed dozens of infants in Lübeck, Germany. Deploying the vaccine in the empire helped Pastorians to strengthen their claims of the vaccine’s safety and respond to critics at the League of Nations. For imperial administrators, BCG was a cheaper alternative to social hygienist solutions such as shorter working hours, vacations, and sanatoriums, which Vietnamese doctors increasingly suggested. The chapter also highlights the importance of the Rockefeller wartime mission to France.

The Making of Imperial Tuberculosis

From 1880 to 1914, Pastorians reinterpreted tuberculosis in the French colonies as a central public health problem. The disease had been previously considered of marginal importance, compared with tropical diseases such as malaria or yellow fever. This chapter looks at the epidemiological studies, new disease ecologies, and technical innovations that made this reinterpretation possible. Armed with the tuberculin skin test, a conviction that contact with the tubercle microbe determined symptomatic illness, and a network of laboratories, Albert Calmette convinced colonial officials that Europeans were infecting a “virgin soil.” This idea echoed emerging anticolonial arguments that highlighted the health costs of “civilization” at events such as the Anti-colonial Exposition of 1931.

Monks and Warriors, Bureaucrats and Businessmen

This chapter describes the ways in which colonial Pastorians challenged the masculine ethos of the Institute, charting a course away from monastic, disinterested, and humanitarian science toward a more heroic and capitalist attitude. With uncertain government support, Pastorians in Indochina and Tunisia had to find new sources of revenue and socialize in a more militaristic environment. These researchers, such as Alexandre Yersin and Charles Nicolle, styled themselves as heroic explorers and conquerors. The impact of World War I strengthened their position and set them on a course to conflict with Émile Roux. In this conflict, both sides reinterpreted the legacy of the historical Louis Pasteur, claiming that the mythical scientist had endorsed their particular view of science. By the end of the 1930s, the heroic ideal had won rhetorically if not entirely in terms of business models.