title: The "cholera cloud" in the nineteenth-century "British World": history of an object-without-an-essence.
abstract: The "cholera cloud" is one of the most persistent presences in the archives of nineteenth-century cholera in the "British World." Yet it has seldom received anything more than a passing acknowledgment from historians of cholera. Tracing the history of the cholera cloud as an object promises to open up a new dimension of the historically contingent experience of cholera, as well as make a significant contribution to the emergent literature on "thing theory." By conceptualizing the cholera cloud as an object-without-an-essence, this article demonstrates how global cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century produced globalized objects in which a near-universal recognizability and an utterly context-specific set of meanings, visions, and realities could ironically cohabit.
authors.affiliation: University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Projit Bihari
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Mukharji
mesh_terms: D002771:Cholera / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000266:history*; D058872:Epidemics / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D006113:United Kingdom