This unique book is a history of health, disease and government policy in colonial Malaya. With insight and clarity, it explores the relationships between biology, environment, population and the structures and requirements of the state. The first account of its kind, it covers the period from the establishment of Colonial Office control to the outbreak of World War II. As she traces the impact of colonialism on health, Lenore Manderson notes that this period was marked by dramatic economic expansion, rapid population growth and changes in patterns of infection. Drawing on the contrasting environments created by colonial capitalism, the book emphasises the role of medicine in legitimating the colonial presence, reinforcing colonial hierarchies and providing a moral logic for imperialism. Much of it also focuses on the populations themselves, on the people whose ill health was directly related to the social and political economy of colonialism. Viewing colonial Malaya through a series of complex lenses, the book integrates social and material history, historical epidemiology and demography, as well as theories of political economy, feminism and postcolonialism.

Lenore is an author, editor or co-author of 29 books and some 750 articles, book chapters and reports, including Sickness and the State (1996) and Surface Tensions (2011). She edited and cowrote (with E.Cartwright and A.Hardon) the Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology (2016). Recent works include Connected Lives (2020, with N. Mkhwanazi), Viral Loads: Anthropologies of Urgency in the time of Covid-19 (with N.J.Burke and A.Wahlberg, 2021) and work of creative non-fiction Water's Edge (2022, with F.Gander). In 2023, she received the Bronislaw Malinowski Award for applied anthropology. After an extensive career in Australia, Lenore is now a distinguished professor of public health and medical anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and divides her time between Johannesburg and Naarm/Melbourne.

1. Introduction: imposing the Empire; 2. State statistics and corporeal reality: problems of epidemiology and evidence; 3. Biology, medical ideas and the social context of illness; 4. Public health and the pathogenic city; 5. Sickness and the world of work: the men on the estates; 6. Brothel politics and the bodies of women; 7. Domestic lives: reproduction, the mother and the child; 8. Conclusion: the moral logic of colonial medicine.