The evolution of medicine in the 18th-century British empire was deeply intertwined with constructions of race, according to Suman Seth, a professor of History and Science and Technology Studies. In a Chats in the Stacks talk, Seth will discuss his new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018), where he explores the complex histories of tropical medicine and colonial politics. Apart from unveiling how medicine influenced ideas of race in early British colonialism, Seth’s book also shows how racial categories and binaries grew out of a view of the world as divided into tropical and temperate zones.

This book talk is sponsored by Olin Library. Light refreshments will be served.