Medicine at the Border ― Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present

The threat of global pandemic disease is currently mobilizing experts, governments, and the exploding industry in 'security'; and yet this has all happened before. Medicine at the Border explores the pressing issues of border control and infectious disease in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Alison Bashford places world health in world history, microbes and their management in globalization, and disease in the history of international relations, bringing together leading scholars on the history and politics of global health. The contributions show how infectious disease has been central to the political, legal, and commercial history of nationalism, colonialism, and internationalism over the modern period.

Alison Bashford is the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, UK and is author of many studies that bring world history, environmental history and medical history together. Her most recent book is Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (2014). She has taught at Harvard University, the Australian National University, and for many years was Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney.