Imperial polities, intercolonialism, and the shaping of global governing norms: public health expert networks in Asia and the League of Nations Health Organization, 1908–37

Abstract

This article stresses the role of colonial governments, not only national sovereign states, in Asia (and to a lesser extent, Africa) at the League of Nations in shaping global governing norms. It emphasizes the significance of lateral and horizontal cooperative actions across colonial governments, especially intercolonial networks of public health experts. It argues that the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) accepted these intercolonial practices in Asia in the 1920s, and that this led it to recognize colonial governments as formal and legitimate units in its intergovernmental conferences held in the mid 1930s. In the process, the LNHO provided an intercolonial channel for ‘national’ experts from colonial Asia to participate directly in regional and global governing norm-making processes. In turn, this highlights both the ambiguous nature of national experts and the intercolonial legacy in international health programmes in developing countries in the post-war period.

The transformation of the global palm oil cluster: dynamics of cluster competition between Africa and Southeast Asia (c.1900–1970)

“…Akami showed that the League of Nations encouraged the cooperation of 'national' public health experts across intercolonial networks, and involved them directly in processes of policy design, institution building, and policy implementation, at both regional and global levels. 22 This research shows that experts' mobility and connectivity favoured the upgrade and exchange of knowledge within broader transnational networks. However, it does not sufficiently appreciate the fact that the increased mobility and stronger connections of these experts often translated into more options for their personal and professional development.…”

The policy responses of the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to pandemic and major epidemic crises since 1921

“…Stamatina Douki Symeon Sidiropoulos modern public health management mechanism (Akami, 2017). It has particularly promoted collaboration and exchange of knowledge and information regarding the etiology and epidemiology, as well as the role of natural and socio-economic factors in causing disease (Epidemiological Information and Public Health Statistics Service in Geneva -Global Epidemiological Data Base).…”

Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo’sMother India

“…In these scenarios, epidemic intelligence and security become watchwords for Mayo, as they were for international health practitioners as well in this postwar era. The latter had adopted these in place of quarantine, bills of health and other older prewar measures empires had employed for protecting trade and shipping routes (Akami 2017). Mother India ’s intelligence gathering constitutes an important antecedent located squarely on one line of descent that leads to the contemporary regime of ‘global health security’ that Andrew Lakoff identifies as one of two within the ‘global health’ complex today, the other being ‘humanitarian medicine’ (Lakoff 2017, 73–77).…”

“…The structural gap between Mayo’s imperialist bellicosity and the ‘peaceable’ discourse of international health (she also tapped) was not however as unbridgeable as one might imagine; for, after all, liberal internationalism and imperialism were in practice interactive rather than ideologically or institutionally discrete (Legg 2011; Legg 2016). In other words, the ideals of ‘international health’, famously advocated by the RF and the League of Nations Health Organisation, which the RF generously funded, did not preclude complicity with Western imperial or national interests (Akami 2017). Despite the ongoing third bubonic plague pandemic, which killed twelve and a half million Indians, Rockefeller philanthrocapitalists had opined that cholera, which ‘concerned humans rather than rats’, would better serve the dual purpose they had in mind for Mayo, namely, ‘defending British colonial rule and… expanding U.S. commercial and industrial interests in India’ (Legg 2009, 234–40; Sinha 2006, 74; Catanach 1988).…”