Colonial Laboratory, Global Experiment: The Co-production of Epizootic Knowledge in Spanish Philippines, 1888-1898

Abstract

This paper explores the colonial laboratory as a site of knowledge coproduction in investigating epizootic diseases in the Philippines under Spain during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Colonial laboratories serve as critical nodes for the empire’s scientific pursuits, and inform policies that affect colonial and imperial health. However, these places were often treated as enclaves isolated from the general public, detached from the affairs of the state, and passive recipients of knowledge from the laboratories of the empire. The isolationist and unidirectional treatment of the colonial laboratory is challenged when epizootics or diseases transmitted between animals transpired. In 1888, the rinderpest virus ravaged through the Spanish Philippines, decimating thousands of livestock that crippled the local and colonial economies. The newly-established Laboratorio Municipal de Manila not only engaged in active policymaking for the control of the disease, but closely collaborated with laboratories of Madrid and Barcelona as well as in Institut Pasteur in Paris. Even as the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Revolution interrupted epizootic research in 1898, the collaboration of the colonial laboratories did not cease under the new American colonial administration. Through the use of laboratory and government reports, the paper considers the coproduction of epizootic knowledge as a ‘global experiment’ that renders the colonial borders paramount and obscures the imperial boundaries. As sites of experimentation, colonial laboratories were well-connected infrastructures through journal publications, personnel correspondences, and specimen exchanges. The paper also argues that while this global experimentation is essential, the process also exposes the inherent inequalities of knowledge coproduction. Contemporaneous laboratory methods and microbiological knowledge had to contend with the unique tropical conditions of the colony. In doing so, this paper explores issues surrounding the global knowledge coproduction, animal health, and scientific management.