This volume provides a definitive assessment of the historiography of the life sciences and medicine in Latin America. It makes historiographic work available for new scholars to join the field and for graduate students and other scholars new to the history of science in Latin America, by means of meaningful and original contributions.This volume brings transnational analysis to the center of global historiographical discussions. It seeks to contribute both empirically and theoretically to the fields of History of Science and Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Latin America, to account for how the knowledge produced in developing countries is part of international knowledge as it circulates in transnational collaborative networks. The volume consists of articles written by experienced, expert authors who expose the lines of ongoing research in the history of life sciences and medicine in Latin America in order to provide an overview of the multiplicity of analytic frameworks and perspectives in a way that allows them to be contrasted with each other. Some of the topics discussed include Asymmetrical networks of collaboration, Circulation of Knowledge, Conceptual History, History and Art, History of Race, Gender and the like, and many more.
In three sections, the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.
Understanding Latin America's recent economic performance calls for a multidisciplinary analysis. This handbook looks at the interaction of economics and politics in the region and includes a number of contributions from top academic experts who have also served as key policy makers (a former president, ministers of finance, a central bank governor), reflecting upon the challenges of reform.
After World War II, UNESCO launched an ambitious international campaign against race prejudice. Casting racism as a problem of ignorance, it sought to reduce prejudice by spreading the latest scientific knowledge about human diversity to instill “mutual understanding” between groups of people. This campaign has often been understood as a response led by British and U.S. scientists to the extreme ideas that informed Nazi Germany. Yet many of its key figures were social scientists either raised in or closely involved with South America and the South Pacific. The Remnants of Race Science traces the influence of ideas from the Global South on UNESCO’s race campaign, illuminating its relationship to notions of modernization and economic development. Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines the campaign participants’ involvement in some of the most ambitious development projects of the postwar period. In challenging race prejudice, these experts drew on ideas about race that emphasized plasticity and mutability, in contrast to the fixed categories of scientific racism. Gil-Riaño argues that these same ideas legitimated projects of economic development and social integration aimed at bringing ostensibly “backward” indigenous and non-European peoples into the modern world. He also shows how these experts’ promotion of studies of race relations inadvertently spurred a deeper reckoning with the structural and imperial sources of racism as well as the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade. Shedding new light on the postwar refashioning of ideas about race, this book reveals how internationalist efforts to dismantle racism paved the way for postcolonial modernization projects.
Latin America has been central to the main debates on development economics, ranging from the relationships between income inequality and economic growth, and the importance of geography versus institutions in development, to debates on the effects of trade, trade openness and protection on growth and income distribution. Despite increasing interest in the region there are few English language books on Latin American economics. This Handbook, organized into five parts, aims to fill this significant gap. Part I looks at long-term issues, including the institutional roots of Latin America's underdevelopment, the political economy of policy making, the rise, decline and re-emergence of alternative paradigms, and the environmental sustainability of the development pattern. Part II considers macroeconomic topics, including the management of capital account booms and busts, the evolution and performance of exchange rate regimes, the advances and challenges of monetary policies and financial development, and the major fiscal policy issues confronting the region, including a comparison of Latin American fiscal accounts with those of the OECD. Part III analyzes the region's economies in global context, particularly the role of Latin America in the world trade system and the effects of dependence on natural resources (characteristic of many countries of the region) on growth and human development. It reviews the trends of foreign direct investment, the opportunities and challenges raised by the emergence of China as buyer of the region's commodities and competitor in the world market, and the transformation of the Latin America from a region of immigration to one of massive emigration. Part IV deals with matters of productive development. At the aggregate level it analyzes issues of technological catching up and divergence as well as different perspectives on the poor productivity and growth performance of the region during recent decades. At the sectoral level, it looks at agricultural policies and performance, the problems and prospects of the energy sector, and the effects on growth of lagging infrastructure development. Part V looks at the social dimensions of development; it analyzes the evolution of income inequality, poverty, and economic insecurity in the region, the evolution of labor markets and the performance of the educational sector, as well as the evolution of social assistance programs and social security reforms in the region. The contributors are leading researchers that belong to different schools of economic thought and most come from countries throughout Latin America, representing a range of views and recognising the diversity of the region. This Handbook is a significant contribution to the field, and will be of interest to academics, graduate students and policy makers interested in economics, political economy, and public policy in Latin America and other developing economies.
Through ten case studies by international specialists, this book investigates the circulation and production of scientific knowledge between 1750 and 1945 in the fields of agriculture, astronomy, botany, cartography, medicine, statistics, and zoology. In this period, most of the world was under some form of imperial control, while science emerged as a discrete field of activity. What was the relationship between empire and science? Was science just an instrument for imperial domination? While such guiding questions place the book in the tradition of science and empire studies, it offers a fresh perspective in dialogue with global history and circulatory approaches. The book demonstrates, not by theoretical discourse but through detailed historical case studies, that the adoption of a global scale of analysis or an emphasis on circulatory processes does not entail analytical vagueness, diffusionism in disguise, or complacency with imperialism. The chapters show scientific knowledge emerging from the actions of little-known individuals moving across several Empires—European, Asian, and South American alike—in unanticipated places and institutions, and through complex processes of exchange, competition, collaboration, and circulation of knowledge. The book will interest scholars and undergraduate and graduate students concerned with the connections between the history of science, imperial history, and global history.
In this sweeping history of reproductive surgery in Mexico, Elizabeth O'Brien traces the interstices of religion, reproduction, and obstetric racism from the end of the Spanish empire through the post-revolutionary 1930s. Examining medical ideas about operations (including cesarean section, abortion, hysterectomy, and eugenic sterilization), Catholic theology, and notions of modernity and identity, O'Brien argues that present-day claims about fetal personhood are rooted in the use of surgical force against marginalized and racialized women. This history illuminates the theological, patriarchal, and epistemological roots of obstetric violence and racism today. O'Brien illustrates how ideas about maternal worth and unborn life developed in tandem. Eighteenth-century priests sought to save unborn souls through cesarean section, while nineteenth-century doctors aimed to salvage some unmarried women's social reputations via therapeutic abortion. By the twentieth century, eugenicists wished to regenerate the nation's racial profile, in part by sterilizing women in public clinics. The belief that medical interventions could redeem women, children, and the nation is what O'Brien refers to as "salvation though surgery." As operations acquired racial and religious significances, Indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mixed-race people's bodies became sites for surgical experimentation. Even during periods of Church-state conflict, O'Brien argues, the religious valences of experimental surgery manifested in embodied expressions of racialized, and often-coercive, medical science.
The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History presents a cutting-edge overview of the dynamic and ever-expanding field of environmental history. It addresses recent transformations in the field and responses to shifting scholarly, political, and environmental landscapes. The handbook fully and critically engages with recent exciting changes, contextualizes them within longer-term shifts in the field, and charts potential new directions for study. It focuses on five key areas: Theories and concepts related to changing considerations of social justice, including postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist approaches, and the field’s growing emphasis on multiple human voices and agencies. The roles of non-humans and the more-than-human in the telling of environmental histories, from animals and plants to insects as vectors of disease and the influences of water and ice, the changing theoretical approaches and the influence of concepts in related areas such as animal and discard studies. How changes in theories and concepts are shaping methods in environmental history and shifting approaches to traditional sources like archives and oral histories as well as experiments by practitioners with new methods and sources. Responses to a range of current complex problems, such as climate change, and how environmental historians can best help mitigate and resolve these problems. Diverse ways in which environmental historians disseminate their research within and beyond academia, including new modes of research dissemination, teaching, and engagements with stakeholders and the policy arena. This is an important resource for environmental historians, researchers and students in the related fields of political ecology, environmental studies, natural resources management and environmental planning. Chapters 9, 10 and 26 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
