Ailing Empires: Medicine, Science and Imperialism

This special issue explores the entanglements of medicine, science, and imperialism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, foregrounding the paradox of 'ailing empires' in which health both sustained and destabilised colonial rule. Drawing on case studies spanning South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, the contributions examine how medical knowledge circulated across imperial and transnational networks, shaping governance, social relations, and epistemic hierarchies. The issue highlights medicine as a technology of control and a site of contestation, attentive to questions of race, gender, and class, as well as to the uneven production and validation of scientific authority. Meanwhile, it emphasises the fragility of imperialism, revealing how disease, crisis, and competition exposed the limits of power. The issue underscores the enduring legacies of imperial medicine in shaping modern inequalities and debates over public health and legitimacy.