Ramesh Examines the Case of Madras: The City “Immune” to Plague in Colonial India
Posted: 2/8/2024 (CSDE Research)
CSDE Affiliate Dr. Aditya Ramesh (History) published an article in the Journal of Urban History, titled “The Plague in Madras: The Making of an ‘Immune’ City“, which examines the city of Madras, long studied for remaining largely free from the plague pandemic, which hit colonial India especially hard in the latter half of the 1890s. The absent epidemic in Madras suggests new ways to understand plague in colonial India and the relationship between the etiology of epidemics and cities more broadly. Colonial officials assumed that the plague would affect Madras in a similar fashion to the deadly outbreaks in Bombay and Hong Kong. The article follows varied explanations for the absence of the plague, showing how tropical environments were hardly inherently vulnerable to disease. Rather, the disease was constituted in specific urban environments, which had implications on understanding of disease vulnerability and immunity.