Microbial Empires: Active Transmission Strategies and Postcolonial Critique

Abstract

In this chapter Taylor-Pirie illuminates how the microbiological imagination made its mark on anxious imperial fictions by close reading H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909) alongside parasitologists’ characterisations of parasite-vector-host relationships. The anthropocentric semantics of war, violence, and criminality characterised tropical illness as another form of colonial insurrection, bolstering the biopolitical power of medicine as an extension of the disciplinary law-and-order state. She interrogates the collision of the ‘medicine as war’ metaphor with a medicalised concept of ‘the Other’ to think through biomedical and national identity—as well as the discomforting agency of non-human vectors—in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald’s ‘Wingéd Death’ (1934), and the poetry and correspondence of parasitologists. Taylor-Pirie examines how vengeful insects, alien invasions, microbial villains, and the supernatural gave shape to the anxiety that Britain’s geopolitical relationships were immersing the imperial capital in a global marketplace of pathogens. By excavating the medical and political contexts of popular cultural forms like the vampire, she historicises lexes of contagion and parasitism that persist in contemporary political discourse surrounding immigration.