Aro Velmet’s Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology & Politics in France, Its Colonies, & the World is as broad in its conceptual reach as its title suggests. Velmet covers specific activities of Pastorian scientists working all over the French Empire, and discusses those Pasteur Institutes outside the Empire, such as the one in Athens, and the relationships, both competitive and collaborative, between the Pasteur Institutes as a body and other international scientific organisations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. The author convincingly demonstrates that Pastorian scientific responses to plague, tuberculosis, yellow fever and the production of intoxicants, specifically rice wine, were shaped by ‘interimperial and international networks’. Velmet further contends that said networks were in turn, and increasingly as time went on, shaped by an ‘interplay between microbial and global politics’ (p. 16). This book is informative, thought provoking and timely in pointing out that public health models that are intended to be universal often obscure local context and local concerns with results that are unpredictable and often unfortunate.
The author draws his information from an impressive array of primary sources found in archives located in five countries on four continents. As for the published sources Velmet uses, they are likewise extensive, wide ranging and appropriate. Velmet has a significant number of illustrations, primarily archival, which are well chosen, well presented and which add to the readability of the text. It is somewhat unfortunate that the author could not consult sources in even one of the indigenous languages of the countries of the French Colonial Empire that he covers. However, I think that it would be virtually impossible for any one scholar to possess the linguistic skill set to be able to use all of those languages, and after all, there are sources in at least five just from French Colonial Indochina. It is also possible that if this book had been written by a scholar specialising in one, or another, of the colonial territories held by France that the book would be somewhat skewed in the direction of that one place instead of being as international as the French Empire itself was during the period under examination. It is to be hoped that Velmet’s very thorough exploration of the French language sources for this impressive analysis of the global and local effects of the work, and the attitudes, of Pastorian scientists will inspire scholars who do have reading knowledge of said indigenous language materials to delve into the more localised history of the Pasteur Institutes.
This book should not only inspire further scholarship, but also scholarly discussion. The author writes in a clear and engaging style and were this book available in a more cost-friendly, for students, paperback copy Pasteur’s Empire would work well in upper division undergraduate seminars and certainly in graduate classes. Unfortunately, there are some relatively minor flaws that must be mentioned, in large part, because they detract from the user-friendliness of this book for both students and senior scholars. These problems all fall under the category of production values, and they should have been thoroughly addressed at the copy-editing stage.
There are numerous places with a word, or words, clearly missing. There are also many places where a word is repeated. It is admirable that this author decided to use diacritics with Vietnamese names and terms, but there are places where diacritics are missing and one instance, in the bibliography, where one author, Trương Bửu Lâm, has two entries – both of them incorrect. As for the index, it is woefully inadequate and weirdly composed for a book with the richness of material that Pasteur’s Empire has. A good example of the problems with the index came to light while trying to look up Clayton machine. Clayton machine, which is mentioned several times in the text, was neither defined nor described on first mention. A look at the index, in case this writer had missed the first mention and thus the description, found ‘Clayton machine. See disinfection’. As one can imagine, for a book with this subject matter, there are quite a lot of entries under disinfection – most of them have nothing to do with Clayton machines. Monkeys, which are rather extensively discussed as lab animals, are not in the index at all. I could go on, but I will not. As noted above, all of the flaws just discussed are relatively minor. However, a monograph that is truly remarkable in the intellectual construction of the health patterns shaped by Pastorian enterprises and those patterns which in turn shaped them should not be marred by this many problems of production.
Aro Velmet’s Pasteur’s Empire is an important and groundbreaking monograph. This book should be read by any scholar working on the French Empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by all those working on nineteenth- and/or twentieth-century medical history. Aro Velmet’s thoughtful analysis and presentation of his wide range of information has implications well beyond even the broad geographic and thematic scope covered in Pasteur’s Empire.
