Bevoise, Ken De. Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Transcription

1 Robert Findlay Bevoise, Ken De. Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines. Princeton: Princeton University Press, In Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines, Ken De Bevoise utilizes the case of the late nineteenth century Philippines to demonstrate the roles, and limitations, of human agency in the propagation, containment, and the very existence of epidemic disease. Rather than examining colonial policy of the Spanish and Americans, changing political situations on the ground, or the institutions of imperialism as such, Bevoise is able to reconceptualize the Philippines colonial period as the people of the time understood it; a period of tremendous colonization by disease. Postulating that historians should always embed particular human interactions in a web of ecological interdependence, Bevoise argues that the history of the Philippines in the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century can only be understood through wider ecological networks that include disease, animals, and other non-anthropocentric causation and participants. Utilizing a total environmental concept allow Bevoise to see behind simple causal reasoning for disease, colonization, and the surveillance state. After a brief introduction the book is divided into two parts. In the first section, Bevoise details the nature of the epidemic crisis of diseases in the Philippines during the late colonial period. Utilizing a classical epidemiological model, he examines the various factors and situations that gave rise to wide-spread contagion instead of the previously more localized and manageable outbreaks of disease. In the second section, he details the histories and causalities for specific diseases such as cholera, beriberi, and malaria.

2 In the first chapter, Probability of Contact, Bevoise seeks to explain how the Philippines went from an archipelago with a relatively low limit on the probability of contact with infections, to one of the most disease-ridden environments of the nineteenth century. He argues that increased migration and social movement, forced urbanization through puebloization, and the beginnings of the plantations system for the cash crop economy all increased the probability of contact between Filipinos and infection. As Bevoise demonstrates in the second half of the book, it was no coincidence that these factors coexisted with imperialism, revolutionary wars, and the introduction of the global economy. All of these factors led to increased contact with infections agents, but, they are only one half of the equation in determining the rate, cause, and effect of disease. In the second chapter, Susceptibility, Bevoise goes on to demonstrate that the individual, cultural, and communal factors of immunity, or lack thereof, to disease stem from issues of poverty, debilitation, and malnutrition all of which contribute to greater susceptibility to individual infection and epidemic disease. These factors again are all interrelated and bound with different aspects of the colonial project during both the Spanish and American colonial periods. In chapter three, Venereal Disease: Evolution of a Social Problem, Bevoise shift to examining various diseases turn by turn. However, despite the misleading titles, the chapters cover a wide range of historical topics and demonstrate their relationship to the spread of disease, not the other way around. For example, venereal disease in the Philippines had long been present at some level, but the massive increase in the number of prostitutes that accompanied the wartime years and the American occupation greatly

3 expanded the reach and severity of the crisis. Moreover, Bevoise demonstrates that the arrest, quarantine, and internal deportation of prostitutes as a method of state control and surveillance was less than successful. However, it did lead to innovations in police management such as the use of photography to identify prostitutes or the distribution of antibiotics to arrested women. This novel idea that the state could manage disease through rational distribution of medicine is highlighted in chapter four, Smallpox: Failure of the Health Care System. After the beginning of the 1870s, the Spanish government launched vaccination programs to contain the growing threat of smallpox. New innovations in Europe and the United States allowed vaccines to effectively prevent smallpox in children. However, the program of vaccination in the Philippines was sporadic and ineffective. After the American occupation, the program was regularized and vaccinations became mandatory, however, it was observed that more than half of all adult Filipinos had already contracted smallpox, in large part due to new colonial projects of urbanization and labor movement. This idea that colonial policies seemingly unrelated to disease could account for a wide range of health problems is once again followed up in chapter five, Beriberi: Fallout from Cash Cropping. Here Bevoise demonstrates that the new cash crop economy created by Spanish and American planners and investors led to a change of diet and a reliance on imported rice which created a nutritional disaster for Filipinos. Without tradition means of subsistence, cash croppers were often left eating little else than white rice which lacks thiamine and leads to the nutritional deficit which often results in death.

4 Malaria was another disease that arose along with the new cash crop economy. In chapter six, Malaria: Disequilibrium in the Total Environment, we see how cash cropping along with new pueblo-creation plans led to deforestation in areas prone to mosquito infestation. Moreover, the wartime excesses destroyed housing and mobilized massive amounts of troops into the jungle, both of which were factors for further infestation. Worse still, rinderpest, a disease which affects cattle, killed off over ninety percent of livestock in the Philippines during the 1880s and resulted in mosquitos choosing humans for lack of a better blood supply. These factors such as the desire for state control, colonial innovations in surveillance, and changes in economic modes of production all culminated in the worst outbreak of cholera in the world in the nineteenth century. In chapter seven, Cholera: The Island World as an Epidemiological Unit, Bevoise demonstrates that giant increases in probability of infection, mass movements of people, and semi-ineffective treatment through quarantine, when coupled with a certain colonial arrogance, created more deaths than any other factor during the period. The idea that colonial policy, governmental missteps, and perhaps even factors of modernization led to increased disease is by now becoming a much more plausible and well accepted historical topic. This book was not so much a major interjection into this theory and historiography as it is a simple recounting of the facts. It comes across as strongly within the reportage model of history and to be sure there had been very little written about the topic at the time. To be less fair, after reading Warwick Anderson s Colonial Pathologies, this book seems to be lacking in its critique of the sources and innovation in theoretical structure. That said, Anderson s book might not have come

5 about without Bevoise s contributions to the creation of the field. Moreover, the work does an excellent job demonstrating the need to, as Bevoise says, think about historical processes ecologically.