Abstract
In my Southeast Asia course, I use the history of plague and cholera to illustrate several crucial historical phenomena. My lessons are not so much the history of the disease itself or traditional medical history. Rather, they focus on how public health measures were a form of colonial modernity. That is to say, developmental projects imposed by a foreign occupier at the barrel of a gun. Scholars of imperialism have stressed the ways in which the colonies served as site of innovation for early 20th century technocrats. Anthony D. King, David Rabinow, Gwendolyn Wright, James C. Scott, and Timothy Mitchell all contributed foundational works to the study of how European administrators used the colonial state as an apparatus to experiment with state-led modernization and effect material change in the life of the colonized peoples.