Paper short abstract:

In the 1890s, deratization was imported from Denmark to French Indochina as the cutting-edge means for plague control. I argue that in an attempt to legitimate bacteriology, the problems of importing a technology designed for Nordic cities into tropical colonies were systematically overlooked.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1890s, the bubonic plague emerged in Southeast Asia as a major challenge for colonial governments. The French scientist Alexandre Yersin identified the plague microbe and proposed several cutting-edge measures for eradicating the scourge. The most labor intensive of these measures was deratification, a process first used in Copenhagen in 1896 and then quickly imported to the tropics and implemented by the Public Works Department with the support of the Pasteur Institute, among the most respected French scientific bodies.

This paper seeks to understand why deratification was so enthusiastically imported to French Indochina, even though its ineffectiveness in colonial tropics quickly became apparent. I focus on the rhetorical connection between 'progress' and 'good governance' formed at international health conferences, and the political geography of transnational movement that enabled this particular exchange. I argue that both Danish public health authorities and Pastorian researchers used the language of 'universal progress' at international conferences to make themselves and their technological innovations credible at home, thereby occluding the need for localization of the deratization process.