Dealing with Anthrax at the Cattle Frontier: Local Understandings, Colonial Technopolitics and Transimperial Vaccines in French Madagascar, 1895-1960

Drawing on extensive archival research in France and Madagascar, this presentation analyses how anthrax – a widespread and very deadly zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis – threatened the profitability of this cattle frontier; and how colonial actors responded to this challenge that was co-produced by the specific properties of the bacterium, cattle mobility and varying disease susceptibility, Malagasy pastoralists’ Eigensinn and colonial-capitalist extractivism.

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