PE-FECATS · Pasteur's Empire - French Expertise, Colonialism, and Transnational Science

Pasteur's Empire - French Expertise, Colonialism, and Transnational Science

"In the 1890s, the Pasteur Institute established a network of laboratories that stretched across France’s empire, from Indochina to West Africa. Quickly, researchers at these laboratories became central to France’s colonial project, helping officials monopolize industries, develop public health codes, establish disease containment measures, and arbitrate political conflicts around questions of labor rights, public works, and free association. The objective of the Marie Curie action ""Pasteur’s Empire"" was to study how the scientific prestige of the Pasteur Institute came to depend on its colonial laboratories, and how, conversely, the institutes themselves became central to colonial politics. Thie research project has argued that decisions as small as the isolation of a particular yeast or the choice of a laboratory animal could have tremendous consequences on the lives of Vietnamese and African subjects, who became the consumers of new vaccines or industrially fermented intoxicants. Simultaneously, global forces, such as the rise of international standards and American competitors pushed Pastorians to their imperial laboratories, where they could conduct studies that researchers in France considered too difficult or controversial. Research conducted for this project followed not just Alexandre Yersin’s studies of the plague, Charles Nicolle’s public health work in Tunisia, and Constant Mathis’ work on yellow fever in Dakar, but also the activities of Vietnamese doctors, African students and politicians, Syrian traders, and Chinese warlords. The project argued that a specifically Pastorian understanding of microbiology shaped French colonial politics across the world, allowing French officials to promise hygienic modernity while actually committing to little development. In bringing together global history, imperial history, and science and technology studies, Pasteur’s Empire deftly integrates micro and macro analyses into one connected narrative that sheds critical light on a key era in the history of medicine. The project's importance to society is twofold: First, it revealed how seemingly humanitarian enterprises, such as the creation of vaccines and microbiological research, was deeply enmeshed in colonial societies. The infrastructural, legal, and political inequalities within the French empire quite concretely made Pastorian advances possible. Second, the project uncovered the role of local actors - Vietnamese doctors, African activists etc. - in this research, as activists and scientists, but also as research subjects and patients. The objectives of the Marie Curie action were to facilitate the completion of a scholarly monograph on this topic, as well as several peer-reviewed articles, to lay the groundwork for the researcher's next project, and to exploit and disseminate the results of this research through to the public in Estonian and in English. These goals were all completed."

Data: CORDIS, © European Union