Alan Bewell. Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Book Review‪)‬

Alan Bewell. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. 373- $23.95 paper. Immanuel Kant had such confidence that the pacifying "spirit of commerce" would eventually overcome the nationalist and colonialist wars of Europe that he considered world travel--international "social intercourse"--a universal, cosmopolitan right. In the third article defining "Perpetual Peace," he declared that "all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their communal possession of the earth's surface." A vehement critic of colonialism, Kant proceeded in this article to a bitter attack on those nations that confuse "visiting foreign countries and peoples" with "conquering them," but in defending "the tight of strangers" to pass benignly across "the earth's surface," he neglected to consider the diseases that traveled with them, altering peoples and environments in their devastating path? As Alan Bewell demonstrates in his remarkable book, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, the development of a "universal community" heralded by Kant, a development we now recognize with the term "globalization," in fact described "an earth unified by the continual movement of people, goods, and pathogens" (296). The colonial world market was also the "common market of bacilli" (quoted by Bewell from historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 4), with its "world-making and world-shattering traffic in pathogens" (9).