The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt with Michael Vann
Episode 28 - September 20, 2020
Michael Vann (California State University, Sacramento) talks to Merle and Lee about the arrival of the Third Plague Pandemic in colonial Vietnam that led to the Great Hanoi Rat Hunt. Michael tells the amazing and amusing story of how colonial administrators put out bounties for killing rats in an effort to stop the spread of plague, and the surprising results of that approach. The story sheds light on questions of colonialism, racism, and imperialism. Michael also talks about the process of turning his academic article into a graphic history and the public outreach and responses to it.
Further Reading
- Microsyllabus: Histories of Epidemic Disease with an extensive commentary
- Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901 (New York University Press, 2007).
- Robert Peckham, Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- Edward Marriott, The Plague Race (Pan Macmillan, 2003).
- Michael G. Vann, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018).
- David Arnold, Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. (University of California Press, 1993).
Our Guest
Michael G. Vann,
Professor, California State University, Sacramento.
