Toxic Histories

David Arnold is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick, and previously taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, the University of Lancaster, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A founder member of the Subaltern Studies group, he has been a visiting professor in Chicago and Zurich, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. His published work includes Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India; Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India; Gandhi; The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856, and Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India's Modernity.

• Introduction: poison traces; 1. The social life of poisons; 2. The imperial pharmakon; 3. Panics and scares; 4. Toxic evidence; 5. Intimate histories; 6. Embracing toxicity; 7. Polluted places, poisoned lives; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'In this meticulous toxicological assay of British India, David Arnold challenges us to rethink how we draw boundaries between the therapeutic and the poisonous, between purity and danger, and between European and Indigenous. Colonialism is refigured as the governance of poisons - and modernity turns into the titrating of toxicities. A revealing forensic study of poison as substance and metaphor under colonial rule, Toxic Histories also shows us how - and why - toxicity became a concept intrinsic to India's modernity. Thus Arnold traces the sad genealogy of our poisoned world.' Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney