Book Review

Comparative/World

Philip D. Curtin has helped train a whole generation of African historians, but his work has always been at the intersection of many fields. His Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (1964) combined the approaches of intellectual and literary history with the history of science to examine the roots of European imperialism in Africa; the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969) utilized quantitative history, African history, and African demographic history to establish a "census" of the slave trade and helped to create the new field of Atlantic Studies.	1
Curtin's most recent book is no exception to this rule. He begins with a simple question: did the decline of disease mortality among soldiers in the nineteenth century make Europeans "more willing than ever before to undertake such imperial adventures as the conquest of Africa?" (p. ix) To answer it, Curtin examines the history of medicine, European imperialism, African and military history. In the end, his negative conclusion suggests the need to rewrite one of the common textbook explanations for the European conquest of Africa.	2
This book grows directly out of Curtin's previous, ground-breaking Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (1989), which examined the military records of European troops stationed overseas. Curtin's finding of a decline in death rates during the course of the nineteenth century was hardly novel, but his was the first systematic, longitudinal study to confirm these trends and show some of the subtleties involved. This new book builds on his earlier work by examining the medical history of fifteen military campaigns in Africa that brought almost all of the continent under European rule by 1900. The success of the book derives from Curtin's ability to choose and analyze in depth, representative episodes that cover the scope of this tumultuous century of Europe's relationship with Africa.	. . .