Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life ThereafterA free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire. |
Contents
The morning muster 2017 | 2 |
Quinines industrial remains at the Mungpoo plantation 2017 | 5 |
Sacks of bark rotting at the closed factory 2017 | 6 |
Laborers extracting rocks from the hole 2022 | 14 |
Cinchona sapling in colonial Darjeeling 1867 | 16 |
The Makings of a WorldHistorical Substance | 17 |
Head European gardener and Cinchona succiruba at Rungbee Mungpoo 1867 | 23 |
Cinchona workers standing in front of a home in Darjeeling ca 1910 | 25 |
Government quinine factory at Mungpoo interior ca 1910 | 37 |
Advertisement touting West Bengal government quinine 1953 | 44 |
Closed government quinine factory interior 2017 | 45 |
A Politics of Remaining | 50 |
Sunil and his shoe 2019 | 51 |
Plantation homestead 2017 | 57 |
Workers caring for cinchona sprouts at the plantation nursery 2022 | 62 |
Workers gathering for the focus group at Mungpoo 2019 | 64 |
Workers stripping cinchona bark ca 1910 | 26 |
Cinchona laborers at a work camp to clear the jungle ca 1910 | 27 |
Workers preparing a freshly cleared field for planting ca 1910 | 28 |
Children stripping coppiced branches ca 1910 | 29 |
Workers weighing bark at the drying shed ca 1910 | 30 |
Workers struggling with a boiler ca 1910 | 31 |
Cinchona work crew at Mungpoo ca 1910 | 33 |
Government quinine factory at Mungpoo exterior ca 1910 | 36 |
Agitation in the Remains | 76 |
The Arts of BecomingAfter In Lieu of Conclusion An Ethics for the TimeBeing 97 122 | 97 |
Signs advertising homestays at Munsong 2022 | 112 |
Preparing a bark sample at the RD lab at Mungpoo 2022 | 125 |
Acknowledgments 137 | 137 |
Bibliography | 175 |
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Quinine's Remains: Empire's Medicine and the Life Thereafter Townsend Middleton Limited preview - 2024 |
Common terms and phrases
acres Agriculture alkaloid Anderson Anit Anit’s Anthropology antimalarials bark become becoming-after began Bhutan British chemical chloroquine chona plantations cinchona community Cinchona Cultivation cinchona plantations cinchona workers CRPF Cultural Darjeeling Darjeeling’s Deb Roy demand directorate drug empire empire’s ethics febrifuge fever tree fieldwork forests future Ghisingh global GNLF Gorkhaland agitations Gorkhaland movement Gorkhas government cinchona plantations government quinine ground growing hillsides Hindustan Lever homestays homesteads horizons human Hydroxychloroquine imperial India Indian quinine Kalimpong Kolkata L. M. Sharma labor land reform lives malaria Malarial Subjects Markham medicine Mingma Morcha Mungpoo Munsong Nepali officers parja patta pharmaceutical Photo places plantation’s plants political postcolonial Proc quinine quinine factory quinine industry quinine’s remains quinologist ruins Sailee Sharma struggle Subba Sunil synthetic Tamang Teesta River territory things tion Tonic tonic water trade unions Tsing Vikash West Bengal West Bengal government world-historical substance