title: Anticolonial climates: physiology, ecology, and global population, 1920s-1950s.
abstract: Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian economist, ecologist, and anticolonial nationalist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968). It argues that the explanatory context was mid-twentieth-century discussion of global population growth, which raised questions of density and belonging to land. Ecology offered a new language and scientific system within which people and place were conceptually integrated, in this instance to anticolonial ends.
authors.affiliation: University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: Alison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bashford
mesh_terms: D002980:Climate; D018595:Colonialism / Q000266:history*; D004463:Ecology / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D010827:Physiology / Q000266:history*; D011158:Population Growth; D044469:Racial Groups; D014329:Tropical Climate