The third and most recent bubonic plague pandemic came to international attention in Hong Kong in 1894 before infecting ports and riverine towns on every continent within the following five years. While generating similar control measures as well as popular responses in a variety of urban settings, plague also highlighted cultural and political differences, which are briefly examined here for Hong Kong, Bombay, Sydney, Honolulu, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Alexandria, Cape Town, Oporto, and Glasgow. Overall, while the plague's impact on humans was uneven, it proved to be an unmitigated disaster for wild rodents and their urban cousins all over the globe.

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This book combines evidence from natural and social sciences to examine the impact on Africa of seven cholera pandemics since 1817, particularly the current impact of cholera on such major countries as Senegal, Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Myron Echenberg highlights the irony that this once-terrible scourge, having receded from most of the globe, now kills thousands of Africans annually - Africa now accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's cases and deaths - and leaves many more with severe developmental impairment. Responsibility for the suffering caused is shared by Western lending and health institutions and by often venal and incompetent African leadership. If the threat of this old scourge is addressed with more urgency, great progress in the public health of Africans can be achieved.

This article provides a quantitative indication of the enormous scale of French military recruitment in West Africa, focussing on the widespread pattern of migration which this recruitment produced. The author describes three types of what he terms "military migration": migration as resistance to military service; soldiers' migration from villages to larger West African centres and especially overseas; and return migration of demobilized soldiers. The article concludes that while military migration is part of the general process of integration of West Africa into the world capitalist system, the changing rhythm of this migration helps pinpoint moments of crisis in this process as well as illuminating the process of class formation.

In 1926, the Governor-General of French West Africa issued a decree allowing local administrations to use a portion of the annual military draft as labourers on public works programmes. The only administrations to take full advantage of this decree was that of the French Soudan, where work had already begun on the first phase of the vast Niger irrigation scheme now known as the Office du Niger. During the next twenty-five years, more than fifty thousand so-called ‘second-portion’ workers from Soudan were assigned to the Office du Niger for a period of three years' service. Ironically, this new system of forced labour to exploit the irrigated land.