From Human Segregation to Rat Surveillance: The Attari Investigation Scheme and the Ecological Turn in Colonial Plague Policy

Abstract

This article reassesses the plague policy of colonial powers through the Report on the Results of Certain Investigations Regarding Rats in the Punjab (The Attari Investigation Scheme, 1907–1908). The article argues that the policy on plague shifted from the coercive human-centered methods to environmental management, which was based upon controlling rats and doing scientific investigations to create statistical analysis. Villages were used as experimental sites and the officials reframed plague as a problem of environmental conditions instead of human contagion. Although this ecological control required constant supervision, statistical comparisons helped justify the intervention. This article shows that how the numerical and scientific reasoning reshaped the colonial public health administration in the rural Punjab.