Stephen Snelders is Research Fellow in the Freudenthal Institute of the Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

• IntroductionPart I: Leprosy in a slave society1. The making of a colonial disease in the eighteenth century2. A policy of ‘Great Confinement’, 1815-18633. Slaves and medicine: black perspectives4. ‘Battleground in the jungle’: the Batavia leprosy asylum in the age of slaveryPart II: Leprosy in a modern colonial state5. Transformations and discussion, Suriname and the Netherlands, 1863-18906. Towards a modern colonial state: reorganizing leprosy care, 1890-19007. Developing modern leprosy politics, 1900-19508. Colonial medicine and folk beliefs in the modern era9. Complex microcosms: asylums and treatments, 1900-1950ConclusionSources and select bibliography

‘Snelders provides a needed corrective to the historiography concerning how Western science began to see leprosy as a colonial problem. His monograph is one of very few that search for the racialized roots of leprosy discourse as far back as the eighteenth century. […] Snelders’s longue duree study greatly expands historians’ understanding of leprosy in Suriname as a microcosm of colonialism’s racial, social and administrative structures.’Kristen Block, University of Tennessee–Knoxville, Social History of Medicine, vol 33, no 3, August 2018‘Snelders’s ambitious book makes an important contribution and adds to our understanding of the history of medicine in the Caribbean and the wider colonial world.’Juanita De Barros, Department of History, McMaster University, New West Indian Guide 92 (2018) 293–396'In his detailed and comprehensive history of leprosy care in Surinam, Stephen Snelders highlights several fascinating and unique features of the history of leprosy in this former Dutch colony.'Hans Pols, University of Sydney, Gesnerus: Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Sciences, Vol. 76, No. 1 (2019)'Leprosy and Colonialism is rich in details, informed in historiographical debate, and written in fluidprose. [...] The book will be of use not only to historians of medicine but, more generally, to historians and students of colonialism.'Isis, Journal of the History of Science Society