Ulrike Lindner

Vaccine Innovation and Adoption: Polio Vaccines in the UK, the Netherlands and West Germany, 1955–1965

“An effective AIDS vaccine could be found as early as 2012, saving 6 million lives if the world is willing to put £10 bn a year into a new programme, the chancellor, Gordon Brown, said in a speech last night in Tanzania”. Faith in biomedical science; the conviction that new vaccines will be translated into lives saved; belief in the necessity of globally concerted action: the British ministers statement reflects views of vaccine innovation that are widely held today. New and improved vaccines seem our best hope of coping with the scourge of AIDS, of arming ourselves against the unknown threats of emergent diseases and potential bioterrorism, and of tackling the resurgence of old diseases arising once more in Europe. Global coordination, pooling our resources, seems self-evidently necessary, given the international nature of a modern epidemic. Much current discussion of vaccine development and use thus has a global character. That is to say, it is conducted under the banner of global slogans or it seeks to establish globally integrated approaches to vaccine research and development (R&D). Over the past two decades the development and rapid introduction of new vaccines have come to dominate the vaccine agenda worldwide. Social scientists and health policy analysts have been set to work, examining barriers to the implementation of international priorities at the national level. Why, for example, are national responses to the availability of new vaccines often so lethargic? A recent study of the adoption of Hemophilus influenza b (Hib) conjugate vaccine is a good example. It shows policy makers in four countries rationally weighing the burden to public health of the diseases against which the vaccine offers protection (bacterial meningitis and pneumonia), against the high cost of the vaccine. Health policy analysts tend to explain the decision to introduce a new vaccine, or to replace an existing vaccine by a new alternative, in terms of the epidemiology and seriousness of the disease, and of scientific consensus regarding the efficacy and potential risks of the vaccine and (perhaps) their costs. The studies of vaccine diffusion and adoption that they conduct have little or nothing to say about political disagreements, or the influence of commercial interests, national traditions, international relations, or global agendas. Where any attention is paid to vaccine history, it is generally in the attempt to illustrate factors (such as resistance to vaccination) that might cause deviations from the rational deployment of vaccines.

The transfer of European social policy concepts to tropical Africa, 1900–50: the example of maternal and child welfare

Concerns about a sinking birth rate and possible national degeneration led to the implementation of various measures in maternal and child welfare across Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Infant health was strongly connected with the idea of population as both a national and imperial resource. In the colonies of the imperial powers similar issues started to be addressed later mostly after the First World War when colonial administrations who until then had predominantly worried about the health of the white European colonizers started to take an interest in the health of the indigenous population. This article investigates the transfer of maternal and infant health policies from Britain and Germany to their tropical African colonies and protectorates. It argues that colonial health policy developed in a complex interplay between imperial strategies and preconceptions as well as local reactions and demands mostly reifying racial demarcation lines in colonial societies. It focuses on examples from German East Africa which became the British Tanganyika mandate after the First World War and from the British sub-Saharan colonies Kenya and Nigeria.

Transcending Gender Roles, Crossing Racial and Political Boundaries: Agnes Hill’s Fight for her Inheritance in German Southwest Africa

ABSTRACT Agnes Hill, the unmarried daughter of a British landowner and farmer and his mixed-race wife, was living a ‘white’ farmer’s life in the colony German South West Africa. In 1908, she was suddenly classified as ‘native’, due to the enforcement of radical racial legislation in the German colony degrading the offspring of mixed-race people as ‘bastards’. The new classification would have had dire consequences for the whole family, especially in respect to their landownership. However, Agnes fought for her family, with the support of solicitors and – as a daughter of a British father coming from the Cape Colony – with the help of the British consul residing in the German colony. She finally succeeded in securing the estate for the family, even if she was an unmarried woman in a predominantly patriarchal settler society. Using mainly material from the court cases, the article traces Agnes Hill’s fight for the Hill inheritance, thereby investigating various crucial issues of colonial societies. It points at the changing boundaries between ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ and the ambiguity of racial classifications. The article argues that women such as Agnes Hill could play a significant role in colonial settler societies and were able to transcend gender-role boundaries.

Re-presenting and Narrating Labour: Coolie Migration in the Cariibbean

“Yet if we have become overly visible, contemporary hypervisibility traces its roots to the singularly modern belief in appropriating and desire to appropriate the world by means of the gaze. The modernization of cultures and societies was linked to an increasing secularization of the invisible. [...] Their use of a visual rhetoric that defines scenarios, excludes or includes protagonists, and, most crucially, evokes pedagogies of the gaze allows us to glean signs of becoming, modes of making visible imagined modernities and communities.” JAGUARIBE/LISSOVSKY 2009: 175-176

Transnational movements between colonial empires: Migrant workers from the British Cape Colony in the German diamond town Lüderitzbucht

Before the First World War, there were significant transnational movements and interactions between colonies of different European powers in imperial Africa, a fact that is often neglected in research on imperial and colonial history. The paper addresses such movements, taking the town of Lüderitzbucht in the German colony of South West Africa as an example. Here, from 1908 onwards, a diamond boom attracted migrant workers from other colonies on a great scale, especially from the neighbouring British Cape. Lüderitzbucht is thus identified as a ‘transnational space’, where interactions between colonial states, conflicting interests of the German colonial administration and German business as well as the life and environment of African migrant workers can be investigated. The developments in Lüderitzbucht point to a growing interconnectedness during a period of worldwide globalisation that also reached the African colonies. German companies in particular were keen to explore the opportunities of a new migrant workforce. Conversely, the paper also stresses that such closer interactions led to a desire to demarcate a national style of colonial rule, especially in the case of the German colonial administration. The growing mixed society developing in Lüderitzbucht was obviously highly disturbing for the South West African government. The move of African workers from a British colony to a German colony also entailed a clash of different colonial cultures. As a further point, the focus on transnational connections highlights the otherwise hidden agency of African workers. Individual fates become visible through the use of new sources that would not be of interest to a history solely concentrating on the German or the British colony.