Book Review

Asia

This volume claims to be the "first work in English on the history of disease in China," which may come as a bit of a surprise to researchers in the field. Notwithstanding this editorial faux pas, it is an ambitious study, based on Carol Benedict's Ph.D. dissertation, tracing the origins and diffusion of bubonic plague in nineteenth-century China, as well as the social and political consequences of amelioration and control in Guangzhou and Hong Kong.	1
Benedict approaches the history of bubonic plague from two directions. The first, a "regional systems approach," draws on the core-periphery regional analysis developed by G. William Skinner, who first developed his theory by examining market structure and urbanization in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 1949–1950. China is described as having eight macro-regional cores based on demographic data and economic resource patterns derived from late nineteenth-century documents. For Skinner, the macro-region can be defined as an autonomous and highly integrated socioeconomic system with minimal interaction outside the core-periphery area; it does not correspond to the political administrative divisions of the Chinese state.	2
Benedict adopts this spatial-economic approach to track the origins and diffusion of bubonic plague (probable but not clearly identified in the sources) in the "Yungui macro-region" in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then its resurgence and spread to the "Lingnan macro-region" in the 1860s. The author agrees with the major authorities on plague that this was primarily due to the Muslim Rebellion (1856–1873), which coincided with a major outbreak in the region, but also due to an increase in interregional trading (particularly opium, mostly by mule train) between Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong provinces.	. . .