A B S T R A C T. During periods of recession, both historians and policy-makers have tended to revisit the multi-faceted relationship between health and economic crisis. It seems likely that the current economic downturn will trigger a new revival of efforts to gauge its implications for people's health around the world. This review will reflect on aspects of the relationship between health and economic crisis, exploring some of the unanswered questions within the historiography of the Great Depression and health, and suggest new directions that this work might take. Within a broadly transnational framework, I will reassess the diverse historiographies of interwar public health, in order to highlight ways in which the methodologies used could inspire future studies for neglected areas within this field, such as Southeast Asia. In doing so, I will illustrate that the effects of the interwar economic fluctuations on health status remain imprecise and difficult to define, but marked a transitional moment in the history of public health.

In January 2010, the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (OGP) Safety Data Subcommittee sponsored a two-day Fatal Incident and High-Potential Event workshop. Considering the industry plateau in fatal accident rates over the last five years, the main objectives of the workshop were to focus specifically on causes and prevention of fatal incidents in the upstream oil and gas industry and to recommend actions that might be taken to prevent future fatal incidents. An analysis of historical OGP fatality and high-potential incident reports and a review of existing rules developed by OGP member companies were conducted, contributing to the development of OGP Life-Saving Rules. Several member companies have realized the benefits from implementing their own programs, which have been based on their own fatal incident learning. However, there is a larger potential benefit to be realized in learning from a larger OGP member company's data set and standardization of rules across the industry. Many contractors are required to learn new rules and procedures each time they go to work for a different client, even though the operating practices and risks are very similar. Migrating toward a standard set of industry life-saving rules will improve understanding and compliance, especially in multilingual and multicultural settings, with the aim of reducing serious incidents and fatalities. The OGP Life-Saving Rules provide operational workers and supervisors with simple, clear icons and instructions on the actions that they are expected to take to prevent fatalities. In many fatal incidents, the actions of individuals are the last barrier in fatality prevention. A set of eight core rules and ten additional rules were selected. The 8 core rules correspond to 40% of the fatal incidents analysed, and the full set of 18 rules correspond to 70% of the fatal incidents analysed.

Intimate interactions across ethnic and cultural lines were integral to the archive of memory within Eurasian families in colonial Penang. Through histories of their European and Asian ancestors, Eurasian families inherited a sense of travel and geographical mobility, and complex forms of cultural exchange often shaped their everyday lives. Eurasian family histories provide access to the messy, lived interactions which formed their social and domestic worlds, but they also hint at their limits. The idea of ‘Eurasian’ in colonial Malaya was a contentious one, a site for debate, as it was experienced by different people in different ways. During the interwar period, members of Penang's Eurasian elite attempted to define and discipline the divided Eurasian communities of Malaya, by purifying Eurasian family histories of their unruly diversity. In exploring the Eurasian social world of colonial Penang, this paper aims to delineate the fragility of such processes of interaction and exchange.