Quinine's Remains: Empire's Medicine and the Life Thereafter

What happens to the colonized after colonial industries leave? Set in the cinchona plantations of India's Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains chronicles the history and aftermath of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria's only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the expansion of the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations--and the fifty thousand people who call them home--remain, and their futures are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but local communities, led by strident trade unions, have successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine's remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the birthplace of urgent political efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.