Colonial Photography Across Empires and Islands

Medicine, Empires, and Ethics in Colonial Africa.

This essay examines the history of European empire building and health work in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on four patterns that shed light on the ethics of outside interventions: (1) the epidemiological and bodily harms caused by conquest and economic development; (2) the uneven and inadequate health infrastructures established during the colonial era, including certain iatrogenic consequence...

Questioning Colonial Photography

States Systems and Universal Empires

"Civilizations" and "world systems" are alternative labels for the largest macropolitical entities that have existed in human history. These historical civilizations/world systems may be seen as having two polar types of power structure, the "states system" and the "universal empire." Each form has certain characteristic accompaniments, which may promote it, be promoted by it, or both. For stat...

Two empires or three?

In the last 100 years, several spectacular discoveries were made in the world of biodiversity, discoveries such as the Okapi in the Congo forest, the only living relative of the giraffes, or Latimeria in the Indian Ocean, a living coelacanth fish, believed to have been extinct for 60 million years. But these were merely small white spots on the world map of biodiversity. By contrast, Carl Woese...

Obesity emergence in the Pacific islands: why understanding colonial history and social change is important.

OBJECTIVE Between 1980 and 2008, two Pacific island nations - Nauru and the Cook Islands - experienced the fastest rates of increasing BMI in the world. Rates were over four times higher than the mean global BMI increase. The aim of the present paper is to examine why these populations have been so prone to obesity increases in recent times. DESIGN Three explanatory frames that apply to both ...