This volume views the study of disease as essential to understanding the key historical developments underpinning the foundation of contemporary Indian Ocean World (IOW) societies. The interplay between disease and climatic conditions, natural and manmade crises and disasters, human migration and trade in the IOW reveals a wide range of perceptions about disease etiologies and epidemiologies, and debates over the origin, dispersion and impact of disease form a central focus in these essays. Incorporating a wide scope of academic and scientific angles including history, social and medical anthropology, archaeology, epidemiology and paleopathology, this collection focuses on diseases that spread across time, space and cultures. It scrutinizes disease as an object, and engages with the subjectivities of afflicted inhabitants of, and travellers to, the IOW.

Gwyn Campbell is Founding Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Canada.

Eva-Maria Knoll is a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria.

1. Introduction.- 2. The Evolution and Spread of Major Human Diseases in the Indian Ocean World.- 3. The 'Frankish Disease' and Its Treatments in the Indian Ocean World.- 4. Reconsidering the Early History of Leprosy in Light of Advances in Paleopathology.- 5. Climate, Weather and Pestilence in the Philippines since the Sixteenth Century.- 6. Malaria in Precolonial Malagasy History.- 7. Disease Alcohol Consumption, and Excise in Nineteenth-Century British India.- 8. European Sailors, Alcohol and Cholera in Nineteenth-Century India.- 9. Chikungunya and Epidemic Disease in the Indian Ocean World.- 10. Challenging Chikungunya: Resistance to Public Health Measures and Etiology during the 2005-2007 Epidemic in Réunion.- 11. Inherited without History? Maldive Fever and Its Aftermath.