Plague, 'Pests', and the Natural World in Singapore and Malaya, c. 1890s to 1930s

Abstract

In the mid-1920s in the Federated Malay States, two colonial medical officials—A.T. Stanton and William Fletcher— reported on two diseases which had newly been recorded in Singapore, Rangoon, and Kuala Lumpur. The diseases were tularaemia and melioidosis, and animals appeared to be implicated in their transmission. The number of cases was tiny. Yet, the potential threat was considered to be extreme. These diseases were not seen in isolation. When the authors looked at these two diseases and their apparent animal accessories, they had an even more horrifying threat in mind: plague. Plague too was a disease of rodents. The ‘Third Plague Pandemic’ had also had small beginnings, and yet had to come to terrorise every inhabited continent. Tularaemia and melioidosis may seem small, but what if they had the capacity to expand to the terrifying proportions of plague? When Fletcher and Stanton were faced with zoonotic disease, their minds jumped to plague. However, historians of plague make no reciprocal leap. In histories of medicine, plague is normally treated in its own isolation and unity. Plague is written as a story of rats, fleas, bacilli, and divided human societies. There is normally no reference to the broader hinterland of other diseases and other animals beyond these two totemic creatures. My paper sets out to correct this short-sightedness. It places plague back in a broader discursive and ecological context of medical thinking regarding ‘pests’, zoonoses, and the intertwining of human, animal, and natural worlds. It makes a case for the significance of plague and ‘plagues’ in Singapore and Malaya more broadly, roughly from the 1890s to the 1930s. It aims, for instance, to see plague in the context of other diseases of rats, of fungal blights threatening plantations, and of insects disturbing the intimate spaces of human habitation. It ties histories of plague to scholarly work normally seen as distant and disconnected. The paper is based on careful and critical readings of the primary-source record. It makes use of archival resources in London, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, as well as the medical literature. Through such means, my paper makes original contributions to medical and environmental histories of Southeast Asia. It returns plague to its proper context, and does so in ways that illuminate burning concerns of both historical scholarship and the contemporary world.